Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha, Part II - chapters 48 - 74 - donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Chapters 48 - 74

http://donquijote.ufm.edu

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha

donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Lesson 20: Another “locus amoenus” 60

Lesson 21: Roque Guinart 62

Chapter 59 - 61 review 70


Lesson 22: Claudia Jerónima 64

Lesson 23: Roque’s distributive justice 66

Chapters 48 - 49



Lesson 6: “We have ourselves a little governorship!” 16

Lesson 7: Sancho solves a paradox 21

Chapters 50 - 53

Lesson 8: “The Constitutions of the Great Governor Sancho Panza” 23

Lesson 11: Sancho resigns 29

Lesson 9: Don Quijote proposes a duel 25

Lesson 10: Teresa Panza’s second letter 27

Chapters 58 - 62

Lesson 17: Altisidora’s complaint 48

Lesson 18: Liberty and five saints, that’s right, FIVE (5) 51

Lesson 19: The false Arcadia and the ferocious bulls 54

Lesson 24: “This is Don Quijote of La Mancha.” 72

Chapters 54 - 57

Lesson 13: “Freedom of conscience” 37

Lesson 12: Ricote 34

Lesson 15: The battle between Don Quijote and Tosilos 42


Lesson 14: Sancho and his ass fall into a cave 39

Part IIChapters 48 - 74

Index

Lesson 1: The encounter between Don Quijote and Doña Rodríguez 5

Lesson 2: Doña Rodríguez’s tale 7

Lesson 3: Doña Rodríguez asks Don Quijote for help 9

Lesson 4: Sancho solves three cases 11

Lesson 5: Making the rounds at night 13

Lesson 16: Don Quijote and Sancho are escorted to the ducal palace 46

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha


Lesson 29: Don Quijote’s final defeat 86



Lesson 35: Los cerdos en Don Quijote 102



Lesson 36: Sancho, martirio de nuevo 105

Chapters 63 - 65 Chapters 70 - 74

Chapters 66 - 69

Lesson 25: Don Quijote and the enchanted head 75 Lesson 37: «¡Viva es Altisidora! ¡Altisidora vive!» 108

Lesson 30: The conclusion to the story of Ana Félix and Don Gregorio 88

Lesson 26: The printing house and “the men of the Inquisition” 77

Lesson 39: La negociación final entre don Quijote y Sancho Panza 116

Lesson 32: Tosilos, mailman 93

Lesson 28: Ana Félix 81

Lesson 41: Don Quijote se vuelve lúgubre y supersticioso 121

Lesson 42: «Alonso Quijano el Bueno» 123

Lesson 34: La parodia pastoril 100

Lesson 38: La cura para el mal de amores es el trabajo honesto 110

Lesson 31: Ricote’s speech on the Expulsion 91

Lesson 27: More galley slaves 79

Lesson 40: La séptima posada 118

Lesson 33: Arcadia de nuevo 98

Parte IIChapters 48 - 74

Course activities 127

“...and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse.”

—Edwin Abbot, Flatland

5 Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha


LESS

ON

01

The encounter between Don Quijote and Doña RodríguezC hapter forty-eight of DQ 2 relates an absurd, but intense, nocturnal encounter between two of the novel’s oldest characters:

DQ and Doña Rodríguez. On one level, we note the growing presence of women. As in the Sierra Morena of DQ 1, women’s actions and desires predominate in Aragón, serving as preludes to the roles of Teresa, Altisidora, Ana Félix, and Claudia

Jerónima in the last half of DQ 2. On a second level, the chaos that ensues and hints of an ethnic clash between Christians and Moors recall DQ’s violent encounter with Maritornes in DQ 1. On a third level, note the symbolic sexual dyad formed by Doña Rodríguez and DQ. Like ancient lovers passing in the night, they frighten each other –each is described as a “phantom”–, but then they come to terms and take each other’s hands in a platonic, private wedding ceremony that causes our Moorish author to comment: “Here, Cid Hamete opens a parenthesis and swears by Muhammad that in order to see the two of them going hand in hand from door to bed he would have given the best of his two djellabas.”

Rodríguez seeks DQ’s help and visits his room unannounced. As her key opens his door, his first thought, as in the Maritornes episode, is that “the enamored damsel has come to assault his chastity.” He makes a Neoplatonic oath to Dulcinea: “the most beautiful woman on earth... the one whom I have engraved and impressed at the center of my heart.” He also recalls the theme of metamorphosis that always accompanies Dulcinea, proclaiming his love regardless of her actual condition, whether she be the Tobosan peasant of DQ 2.10, one of Garcilaso’s nymphs, or the woman in the Cave of Montesinos of DQ 2.35: “whether you are, my lady, transformed into a vulgar peasant girl, or a nymph from the golden Tagus weaving together cloths of gold and silk, or whether Merlin or Montesinos have you where they desire.” Cervantes’s technique of narrative simultaneity underscores the link between Dulcinea’s uncertain status and Rodríguez’s strange visit: “The ending of these words and the opening of the door happened all at once.”

Cha

pte

r 48

Next we have an amazing image of DQ standing up in his bed, staring down at Rodríguez “from his watchtower.” He crosses himself in fear. As she approaches, she is also startled, dropping her candle and leaving them in the dark. When Rodríguez tries to flee, DQ asks her to identify herself, insinuating that she is a spirit from Purgatory, another major theme in DQ 2: “If you are a soul doing penance, tell me so.” He claims his profession of knight-errantry still requires him to save her: “even to do right by the souls in Purgatory.” Hilariously, he makes her promise that she is not a go-between. In response, Rodríguez claims that she is not so old, that she still has her soul in her body and all of her teeth. She also mentions “this land of Aragón,” so that this weird encounter is related to the geography of Spain.

The episode’s sexual implications grow. When Rodríguez leaves to retrieve another candle, DQ doubts his chastity, reasoning that the devil might be trying to tempt him. Thanks to the narrator’s access to DQ’s inner thoughts, we learn that he is a virgin: “And who knows whether this isolation, this occasion, or this silence will awaken in me desires that lie dormant, and, at the end of my years, cause me to fall where I have never even stumbled?” DQ leaps out of bed to shut the door, but Rodríguez returns. Now it is her turn to suspect something sexual: “Are we safe, Sir Knight? For I do not take it as a very chaste sign that your grace has gotten out of bed.” DQ asks her the same thing: “I should be asking the same thing, madam... and, thus, I ask if I am to be safe from being assaulted and violated.” He points to the impropriety of the situation: “because I am not made of marble, nor you of bronze, nor is it now ten in the morning... and in a room more enclosed and secret than must have been the cave in which the treacherous and daring Aeneas took his pleasure of the beautiful and compassionate Dido.” It’s another cave. And note how DQ has again become feminized, and how Cervantes has inverted the same encounter between Aeneas and Dido previously alluded to by Altisidora. This is so hilarious and odd that Cide Hamete makes a sarcastic comment. For those of us who are older, though, there is something heartbreaking here.

“Are we safe, Sir Knight? For I do not take it as a very chaste sign that your grace

has gotten out of bed.”



LESS

ON

02

Doña Rodríguez’s taleT he story Rodríguez tells has three parts: her youth, the death of her husband, and the seduction of her daughter by the

son of one of the Duke’s vassals. Her narrative reviews the major themes of the novel. The north-south theme of ethnic and religious conflict reappears. We are in Aragón, and thanks to Cide Hamete’s Moorish intervention, we now return to the

medieval holdout of Visigothic Christians in the far north. Like Ruy Díaz de Viedma in DQ 1.39, Rodríguez was born in the region of “the Mountains of León,” associated with the purest Spanish nobility, as she says, “the Asturias of Oviedo, and from lineage.” There also resurfaces the difficult transition from feudalism to early market capitalism found in SP’s quest for a salary from DQ. Rodríguez’s parents took her to modern Madrid “to do needlework as a maidservant to a principal lady.” So she was a worker with enough skills to make money, but also a servant at the mercy of her mistress’s generosity: “I remained an orphan and dependent on the miserable salary and the meager favors that are typically given to such palace servants.”

The story of Rodríguez’s marriage and the death of her husband contains picaresque themes. Her husband was a “squire” at the palace where she served, but she says he was also honorable: “somewhat advanced in years, bearded and impressive, and, above all, an hidalgo as noble as the king, for he was from the mountainous region.” As elsewhere in DQ, this constant insistence on Christian purity makes us doubt it. Rodríguez carried on a secret love affair with this man, but when her mistress found out, she forced them to marry. The phrase Rodríguez uses here echoes the corrupt petitioner at SP’s court: “we tied the knot of peace before the Holy Mother Roman Catholic Church.” Remember that in the case of the petitioner the outward appearances of his son and Clara Perlerina were so grotesque that his claims of purity were ridiculous. Rodríguez’s story seems more realistic, less absurd, but is it really all that different?



The death of Rodríguez’s husband occurs after an eerie event in the streets of Madrid. Rodríguez erupts in tears, recalling the majesty with which her husband escorted her mistress on his mule: “God help me! And with what majesty he carried my mistress on the haunches of a powerful mule!” It’s a tragic version of the violent mule that kicked the barber in the Micomicón plot of DQ 1.29 as well as Dulcinea’s shocking fall in DQ 2.10. Note, too, the hyperbolic emphasis on the color of the mount: “as black as jet itself!” (azabache). Readers of Lazarillo de Tormes will recognize this as an allusion to race. Also present is the north-south conflict of medieval Spain, for the subsequent scene takes place on “Santiago Street in Madrid” precisely at “the Guadalajara Gate,” an open-air marketplace frequented by pícaros.

The abuse suffered by Rodríguez’s husband highlights the hierarchal privilege that Cervantes always criticizes. The squire turns his mule toward a court magistrate as a sign of respect, but this angers his mistress, whom Rodríguez calls “my Lady Doña Casilda,” an allusion to Saint Casilda of Toledo, a medieval devotee of Saint Vincent of Zaragoza. Note the trajectory of the novel in this allusion. Doña Casilda’s arrogance grows (as we saw recently with SP) until she attacks Rodríguez’s husband. As poetic justice, she is then thrown from the mule: “full of choler and rage, she took a thick needle, I think it was a knitting pin, from its case and she stabbed it into his back, which caused my husband to shout out and twist his body such that he knocked her grace to the ground.” Rodríguez’s husband seeks medical attention “in the house of a barber” and Doña Casilda is forced to walk home. Remember when SP was forced to walk in DQ 1?

“somewhat advanced in years, bearded and

impressive, and, above all, an hidalgo as noble as the king, for he was from the

mountainous region.”



LESS

ON

03

Doña Rodríguez asks Don Quijote for helpT he strangest aspect of the story involves what many see as another slip of the pen or printer’s error: “my lady the Duchess

fired him, which was such a blow to him that I am convinced without a doubt that it caused his death.” Has Cervantes, not learning his lesson from part one, now inadvertently confused Rodríguez’s earlier mistress with the Duchess whom she

now serves? I think not. Doña Casilda is in fact our unnamed Duchess, and the point is that she has a shameful and symbolic past. Consider, for example, that the real Saint Casilda was a Muslim woman who behaved charitably toward Christians; whereas the Duchess in Rodríguez’s tale abuses her servants, whose impurity alludes to the Moriscos.

Finally, Rodríguez tells DQ why she seeks his help: “since I was known as an excellent seamstress, my lady the Duchess, who was recently married to my lord the Duke, decided to bring me with her here to the Kingdom of Aragón, with none other than my daughter as well.” Her daughter has many talents, like Dorotea, and, again, Rodríguez uses contradictory phrases to overemphasize her blood purity: “I can say nothing of her purity. She is purer than rushing water.” The daughter falls in love with the son of a rich farmer and, like Dorotea and Fernando, “I know not how nor where, they met, and under the pretext of his word to marry her, he seduced my daughter.” Rodríguez has complained to the Duke, but he ignores her –“he gets ‘merchant’s ears’ and will scarcely listen to me”– because the rich farmer has given him loans and guaranteed others, and so he does not want to risk his line of credit: “the reason is that the father of the seducer is very rich and makes him loans and sometimes provides guarantees when he gets into trouble, so he doesn’t want to offend him.” Notice Cervantes’s typical turn to bourgeois material reality here.

So Rodríguez wants DQ to right this wrong. Moreover, she claims that Altisidora is not what she seems –“not all that glitters is gold”–, and that she is envious of her daughter’s beauty. Then she slanders the Duchess, who, although she appears beautiful (like Marcela’s mother, her face contains the sun and the moon), she has two incisions on her legs “from which she drains all the black and yellow bile that the doctors say fills her body.” Gross! DQ accepts Rodríguez’s word, although he argues that “such incisions in such places must not secrete bile but liquid amber.” This recalls his objection to the slander of Dulcinea by the merchants of Toledo in DQ 1.4. The chapter ends when the door to DQ’s room flies open, Rodríguez’s candle is put out, and they are left in darkness “in the wolf ’s mouth, as they say.” Rodríguez and DQ are then slapped and pinched for almost half an hour before the “phantoms” retreat. But wait, I thought Rodríguez and DQ were the phantoms.

We return to SP’s governorship in chapter forty-nine. The novel we are reading is fiction, but we must also remember that most of the characters on SP’s island are acting, and that most of his rule is a scripted farce. In other words, we face another extension of DQ’s mise-en-abyme structure: Cide Hamete is supposedly the ultimate author, and translators and narrators provide additional frames between him and us; but now we see that within this already messy text, certain characters place other characters within still other narrative frames. DQ traps us all in its existentialist game, with implications for a range of viewers and readers. In this case, we might identify with the Duke and the Duchess, feeling privileged and more knowledgeable vis-à-vis SP. But the Duke and Duchess are just characters in Cervantes’s novel, so perhaps we should reflect on our own situation. As the Duke’s majordomo says: “deceptions turn into the truth and the deceivers find themselves deceived.” Also, like the play within the play in Hamlet, Cervantes aims his mise en abyme at a political problem, using all these frames to signal us: “Look here! Sancho’s reign in Barataria is the ultimate focus of part two of my novel.”

She has two incisions on her legs “from which she drains all the black and yellow bile that

the doctors say fills her body.”



LESS

ON

04

Sancho solves three casesA t the beginning of chapter forty-nine, SP’s sophisticated reflection on his experience as ruler amazes everyone. Anticipating

the modern notion of crony capitalism, SP observes how difficult it is to resist “the importunities of those seeking favoritism.” He notes how citizens become irate when they don’t get handouts from their rulers: “they curse them and

spread rumors... they even slander their lineages.” Populist resentment and racism often undercut powerful people in early modern Spain. Cervantes then turns SP’s desire to eat a traditional Spanish stew of Burgos, known as “rotten pots,” which should recall SP’s sorrow over the loss of “the fleshpots of Egypt” at Camacho’s wedding (cf. DQ 2.22). In other words, SP has finally become a kind of Pharaoh. Ironically, however, he claims to value equality: “when God makes it dawn, he makes it dawn for all.”

The contradictions of being a ruler are on display at Barataria. SP’s butler informs him that the people appreciate “the soft manner of governing that your mercy has demonstrated at the beginning.” But SP alludes again to the picaresque symbol sine qua non: “Once again, I say that my sustenance should be looked after, as should that of my gray, which is all that matters in this business.” Then he embarks on a nocturnal patrol –“let’s make the rounds” (Cf. Calderón’s El médico de su honra)– in order to purify Barataria “of all types of human filth and vagabond people.” His allegory is political: “people who are indigent and lazy are to the republic what the drones are to the hive, for they eat up all the honey that the worker bees produce.”

Again, SP resolves three specific cases. The first involves gambling. A witness to a card game demands a tip from a man who won 1,000 reales. The gambler accuses the witness of extortion and refuses to pay the traditional tip. Careful readers note that the witness is corrupt. And more careful readers note that when SP rules that the gambler must pay 130 reales, this is the exact amount of money that was at issue between the creditor and the debtor of DQ 2.45. When SP contemplates banning gambling houses, a scribe points out

Cha

pte

r 49



that it is better to regulate gambling. This discussion is interrupted by the night’s second case. Here we investigate the limits of royal power in an episode that recalls the galley slaves of DQ 1.22 and anticipates modern debates over the rights of citizens confronted by the police. Note how the man is presumed guilty. According to the arresting officer: “he started to run like a deer: a sign that he must be some delinquent.” The man is cheeky, and so SP, behaving like an absolutist king –“I am the very air”–, orders him thrown in jail. The case turns on a technicality as the arrested man tells our governor that he can control his body but not his mind: “No matter how much power your mercy has... it will not be enough to force me to sleep in jail.” SP is infuriated –“do you have some guardian angel who’ll release you?”–, but when he finally grasps the man’s literal point that “shackles and chains” cannot force him sleep in jail if he stays awake, he lets him go. There’s a defense of freedom of religious conscience here. However, SP’s final advice to the man evinces a pragmatic truth: “from now on don’t joke around with officers of the law, because you’ll come across one who’ll react to the joke by busting your skull.” Don’t run from the police!

“people who are indigent and lazy are to the republic what the drones are to the hive, for they eat up all the honey that the worker bees produce.”



LESS

ON

05

Making the rounds at nightT he night’s final case is the strangest of all. The narrator lets us know that, unlike all the other cases, this one is not planned

by the Duke’s minions: “those who were in the know regarding the jokes to be played on Sancho were those most in amazement, because this happening and discovery was not orchestrated by them.” Helped by her brother, a young girl

has escaped her household, where her father kept her secluded. She dressed like a man, and her brother like a girl, so that she could see the outside world. The girl is upset, but SP dismisses everything as a childish prank and returns the siblings to their father’s house. This confusion of genders caused by cross-dressing echoes that of both the ancient byzantine novel and many of the era’s plays.

Once again, Cervantes indicates social problems while distracting us with complex narrative details. Careful readers will note three odd aspects to the girl’s story. First, why does her brother dress like a girl? Nobody says. Second, as SP points out, the girl claims that “the force of a certain jealousy has made her break with the decorum that chastity requires,” and yet no jealousy appears anywhere in her story. Third, the girl first states that her father is Pedro Pérez Mazorca, the “tax collector,” but then she changes her mind, insisting her real father is “Diego de la Llana... a principal and wealthy hidalgo.” The only explanation she gives of this confusion is that Pedro Pérez “very often visits the house of my father.” But this just begs the question of why she first claimed Pérez is her father. Did Llana’s wife have an affair? This is all very weird. To top things off SP’s butler plans on asking the girl’s father for her hand in marriage, and SP himself thinks the girl’s brother would make a good husband for his own daughter, Sanchica.



What is going on here? Cervantes is again addressing the Expulsion of the Moriscos and the conflict between Christians and Moors. He is also suggesting that love and commerce in textiles represent possible solutions. Note the Neoplatonic impact that the girl has on SP’s butler, and note that she exhibits oriental characteristics: “The beauty of the maiden had pressed upon the soul of the butler, and once more he brought his lantern close to see her again, and it seemed to him that those were not tears that she was shedding, but seed pearls or the dew of the meadows, and he even raised them a level and compared them to Oriental pearls.” Her dress is also exotic: “her hair tied back in a net of gold and green silk, as beautiful as a thousand pearls... with stockings of scarlet silk with garters of white taffeta finished with gold and seed pearls: her breeches were green, made of gold cloth, and her jacket or coat was of the same.” This recalls Zoraida. Her brother too: “He wore nothing less than a rich skirt and a shawl of blue damask with fine gold fringe.” Finally, the girl’s first father’s status as a tax collector who frequently visits the home of her second father, who is a rich hidalgo, recalls the Duke’s aversion to Rodríguez’s daughter’s desire to marry the son of another rich hidalgo. Taxes depend on trade, and trade requires social relations. In my view, Cervantes is saying that the wealth of Aragón is now threatened by an inflexible social hierarchy, governmental corruption, and racism.

“the force of a certain jealousy has made her

break with the decorum that chastity requires,”

“...and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse.”



LESS

ON

06

“We have ourselves a little governorship!”C hapter fifty performs another miraculous narrative maneuver. It takes Cide Hamete’s explanation of what actually happened

in DQ’s room, when he and Doña Rodríguez were attacked, and weaves it together with the arrival of the Duke and Duchess’s page at SP’s home bearing gifts and letters for Teresa. A double narrative now becomes a triple narrative. We learn that

Altisidora and her friend were the intruders who avenged Rodríguez’s disloyalty to the Duchess, specifically the fact that she had “made public knowledge the Aranjuez of her leg-fountains.” On one hand, feminine discourse continues to dominate the novel. On the other hand, the narrator says women are not perfect: “affronts that go against the beauty and vanity of women awaken in them an immense ire and kindle in them a desire for revenge.” Next, we learn that the page sent to visit SP’s family had previously played the part of Dulcinea enchanted by Merlin. So women are not always what they seem.

Teresa and Sanchica’s chatter in this episode echoes the pettiness of Altisidora and the Duchess. They repeatedly relish their new power and status. Teresa brags –“We have ourselves a little governorship!”– and imagines humiliating her rivals: “let the most arrogant hidalga snub me now, for I’ll set her straight!” Sanchica fantasizes about provoking the envy of others by going to court in a coach “as if she were the Popess”: “Bad year and bad month for all the gossipers in the world, and as long as I’m warm, let the people laugh!” The two women even bicker over who gets the corral necklace sent by the Duchess. Sanchica: “look, you’re gonna have to share that necklace with me.” Teresa: “let me wear it on my neck a few days.”

Cha

pte

r 50

Note the exchange between Teresa and the Duchess. The Duchess’s gifts of the necklace and Sancho’s green jacket that will be made into a dress for Sanchica are followed by her request for acorns. Note also the episode’s allusions to a rigid caste society being dismantled by such commerce. Teresa is a Cinderella figure rebelling against her arrogant neighbors: “the hidalgas... who think that because they’re hidalgas the wind shouldn’t touch them, and who go to church with all the arrogance of queens, and who seem to think it’s a dishonor to even look at a peasant woman.” She sees the Duchess as her ally: “this good lady, even though she is a duchess, she calls me her friend and she treats me like her equal.” The page then highlights this egalitarianism as a distinguishing characteristic of the Aragonese nobility: “the ladies of Aragón, even though they’re just as well-born, are not as punctilious and self-important as Castilian ladies, and they treat people in a simpler manner.”

Cervantes also targets religious orthodoxy. The necklace the Duchess gives to Teresa is a parody of a garish rosary: “the Hail Marys are of fine coral and the Our Fathers are of beaten gold.” Likewise, our priest is so stunned by all the contradictions that he becomes a doubting Thomas: “on one hand, I can see and touch the fineness of this coral, and, on the other hand, I read that a duchess has requested two dozen acorns.” The narrator tells us that the priest and Carrasco realize the page is mocking SP’s women. Nevertheless, the same narrator tells us that the two men are so shocked by this turn of events that they think they might be losing their minds like DQ. Carrasco speaks to the page on their behalf: “even though we touched the presents and we have read the letters, we do not believe, and we think that this is one of those things that concern our compatriot Don Quijote, who thinks they are all performed by enchantment; and so, I have half a mind to touch and feel your grace in order to see whether you are a phantasmagoric ambassador or a man of flesh and bone.” The page’s response is double. He echoes the narrator in DQ 2.10: “the truth is what I have stated, and it is what will always rise above falsehood, like oil above water.” Then, in Latin, he cites an earlier passage from the same biblical text alluded to by Carrasco: “operibus credite, et non verbis,” i.e., credit the works, not the words (John 10.38; cf. DQ 2.25).

Sanchica: “look, you’re gonna have to share that necklace with me.”

Teresa: “let me wear it on my neck a few days.”



Chapter45 - 47 review



In chapter forty-eight, DQ experiences a nightmare of courtly intrigue driven by feminine rivalries and slanders. Rodríguez’s story reviews picaresque themes: caste privilege, race relations, and commerce. In chapter forty-nine, SP faces three more cases that satirize political power on Barataria. The last of these is highly enigmatic due to SP’s and his butler’s plans to link their families via marriages to a pair of crossdressing siblings as well as the girl’s confusion regarding the identity of her father. Chapter fifty echoes this social flux when SP’s wife and daughter fantasize about their new status. Cervantes’s perspectivism and irony are so radical here that Carrasco and the priest are prepared to accept that DQ’s insanity is insightful. What exactly about SP’s reign in Aragón causes all this? It’s supposed to be an illusion, but perhaps some greater truth is on display. The biblical doubting Thomas theme urges us to think.

Let’s review

“A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This –although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense– is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.”

—Emmanuel Goldstein, The Theory

and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism



LESS

ON

07

Sanchosolves a paradoxC hapters fifty-one though fifty-three of DQ 2 conclude Sancho’s rule over Barataria, i.e., the climax of the novel’s political

allegory. Note that the novel is decidedly epistolary here. Chapter fifty-one opens with a review of Cervantes’s meditation on politics circa 1614. First, he recalls politics generally, for after SP makes his rounds, the majordomo spends the rest of

the night writing to the Duke and Duchess about the governor’s paradoxical rule: “because his words and actions were all mixed up, with indications of both discretion and idiocy.” Second, Cervantes recalls Barataria’s byzantine love narrative, for the steward spends the night “his thoughts occupied by the face, initiative, and beauty of the disguised damsel.” Finally, he recalls classical political philosophy’s metaphor of medicine, for SP wants food, which in turn allows Pedro Recio to affirm that “small and delicate morsels revived the wit, which was precisely what was needed for persons assigned to high commands and serious offices.” As a glimpse of Cervantes’s cynicism, the narrator calls Recio’s reasoning nonsense –“sophistry”– and tells us that SP “in his heart he cursed the governorship.”

Now SP confronts a final riddle. The last test of his capacities as governor is a philosophical paradox, designed to paralyze SP’s ability to reason and immobilize him like Buridan’s ass. A foreigner tells SP about a noble’s estate divided by a river. This lord has placed a gallows and a tribunal at one end of a bridge, and he has established a law whereby anyone wishing to cross must declare his intentions. If the traveler tells the truth, he may pass; if he lies, he is hanged. A man declares “that he was going to die on that gallows over there.” It’s a paradox: according to the law, if the judges let the man go free, then they must hang him, and if they hang him, then they must let him go free. SP first acts like Solomon splitting the baby (1 Kings 3.16-28): “of this man, that part which swore the truth they should allow to pass and that which told the lie they should hang.” But this hilarious sophistry will only kill the man, thus breaking the law: “it will be necessary that this man be divided into two parts, the lying half and the honest half; and if he is divided, by force he will die.”

Cha

pte

r 51



Note two things. First, the episode recalls the Balsam of Fierabrás in DQ 1.10, suggesting that Cervantes’s scheme was always going to span both parts of the novel. Second, like his initial humility at Barataria when he refused to accept the epithet “Don,” SP’s final decision fulfills another aspect of DQ’s princely advice: when in doubt, error on the side of mercy. SP says this himself: “that they should let him pass freely, for it is always more praiseworthy to do good than bad... a precept came into my memory, one among the many that Don Quijote told me the night before I came to be governor of this isle, which was that when justice is in doubt, I should lean toward, and choose, mercy.” SP states that DQ’s advice was made for this particular case, “fitting perfectly.” The juridical aphorism on display is In dubio, pro reo, a principle of criminal justice: a defendant is innocent until proven guilty.

The Duke’s majordomo compares the governor favorably to “Lycurgus himself ” and SP is proud to have resolved the matter so neatly. He says “bars unbent,” meaning “no harm, no foul.” After the resolution of the paradox of the bridge, the narrator announces the end of SP’s rule: “the butler... planning to conclude with him that very night playing the final joke on him for which he was commissioned.” Cervantes concludes the Barataria allegory with a statement: governance inevitably faces paradoxes, and one solution is to show mercy whenever possible. But we might ask: Whom does he have in mind? And will not showing mercy cause people to take advantage of a tendency to not enforce the law? We’ll find partial answers later. For now, realize that Cervantes is thinking of the Aragonese nobility of 1591 and the Morisco population in southeast Spain circa 1609. And remember our author’s “perspectivism”: life’s hardest decisions are by definition never simple.

“In dubio, pro reo”



LESS

ON

08

«Las constituciones del gran gobernador Sancho Panza»R einforcing the idea of a political “endgame,” a final letter from DQ arrives at SP’s court. SP orders his secretary to look it over,

and he responds: “It can well be read out loud, for what Sir Don Quijote writes to your grace should be written and stamped in letters of gold.” DQ’s preamble indicates his pride in SP’s humility, which has caused a metamorphosis. He

alludes to Psalms 113.7 and 1 Samuel 2.18 when he gives thanks to heaven: “which knows how to lift the poor out of the dung heap.” He also alludes to SP’s miraculous transformation from an ass into a human being: “They tell me that you govern as if you were a man, and that you are a man as if you were a beast, according to the humility that you manifest.” There’s more advice on how to avoid a political fall from grace: be civil, make sure the people are well fed, don’t issue too many decrees, embrace virtue and avoid vice, remember the Aristotelian middle way, and promote justice and fairness regarding weights and measures in the marketplace. Above all, SP should review DQ’s written advice. Then DQ informs SP about “a certain catment,” asks him if he still thinks the majordomo is the Countess Trifaldi, and hints at Rodríguez’s “business,” which he fears will anger the Duke and Duchess. Finally, DQ cites an anti-utopian, Aristotelian dictum in Latin: “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas,” or “Plato is a friend, but the truth a greater friend.” Strangely, he assumes SP has already learned this from his governing experience. DQ was an idealistic humanist at the beginning of his letter, but he’s a rational scholastic at the end.

Typically, right when we locate a moral or identify with a character in DQ, Cervantes deploys irony and other perspectives to make us question our conclusions. Take SP’s letter. Whereas DQ’s letter suggested that the governor was doing well, SP’s reply is ominous. He has ignored some of DQ’s advice in favor of humility and against lineage. Specifically, he displays social status by not cutting his fingernails and he decides to marry his son to the distressed daughter of Diego de la Llana, because the latter is “as much an hidalgo and an Old Christian as one could ask.” Furthermore, although he’s concerned with maintaining an orderly marketplace, he still sounds corrupt

at times. For example, he exaggerates his avoidance of graft and bribes –“So far I have not handled any fees nor taken any bribes”–, but he then says he will acquire gifts for DQ, either “either by skirt or by sleeve,” that is, honestly or dishonestly. SP says he doesn’t understand what DQ means by the “catting,” although he assumes it involves enchanters. He also expresses concern that DQ might alienate his noble benefactors. Strangest of all, SP sends his master “a very curious type of cane flute, which is attached to bladders, that they make on this isle.” This echoes the albogues or “double flutes” of Camacho’s wedding in DQ 2.19, the devil’s bladders in DQ 2.11, the man who inflates dogs in the prologue to DQ 2, and the Knight of the Phoebus’s enema in DQ 1.15.

Finally, we come to the edicts that SP imposes on the citizens of Barataria: “The Constitutions of the Great Governor Sancho Panza.” Perspectivism: as elsewhere in SP’s reign, this legal document manifests a weird combination of wisdom and stupidity. SP’s laws are prudent, tragic, or absurd, depending on your point of view. Keep in mind that many of these laws were actually attempted in Cervantes’s day. SP creates the office of “bailiff for the poor,” which will make sure that beggars don’t fake their poverty. He bans erotic singing and requires blind beggars to document the authenticity of the miracles in their songs. Cervantes’s skeptical attitude toward religious thinking arises here. But prices and governmental interference in the marketplace are the more important focus. SP’s legal contradictions suggest political satire. On one hand, he bans hording and speculation. Not good economic policy. On the other hand, he allows market pricing on the importation of wines, so long as they are properly labeled: “so as to be able to price them according to their quality, sweetness, and reputation.” And yet, he orders fraud in selling wine punishable by death! His most destructive and deeply ironical laws involve price fixing: “He lowered the prices of all types of footwear, especially that of shoes, which it seemed to him were running a bit inflated; he placed a ceiling on the salaries of servants, which galloped freely down the road of self-interest.” Like SP’s first legal case, when the farmer asked the tailor to make more and more hats from the same amount of cloth, SP has now reduced the quality and accessibility of footwear for the citizens of Barataria. SP also orders a maximum wage for servants. This is a particularly odd gesture given our squire’s constant requests for a salary from his master.

“so as to be able to price them according to their quality,

sweetness, and reputation.”



LESS

ON

09

Don Quijote proposes a duelI n chapter fifty-two DQ challenges the son of the Duke’s banker-vassal to a duel in defense of Doña Rodríguez’s daughter. Then

two letters arrive from Teresa Panza, one to the Duchess and the other to her husband. Central throughout is the conflict between the outmoded codes of conduct of feudalism and the increasing social mobility of the modern world. The narrator reports that

Cide Hamete reports that DQ tires of his courtly existence and longs to depart for Zaragoza, where he plans to “to win the suit of armor offered to the victor at such festivals.” This refers to the chivalric games that flourished under Alfonso V, the Magnanimous, whose empire included Aragón, Barcelona, Naples, Valencia, Sicily, Majorca, Sardinia, and Corsica. It is difficult to separate nostalgia for the reign of Alfonso V from the Duke and Duchess’s estate on the Ebro and SP’s rule on the Isle of Barataria. Also, Cervantes here suggests that DQ’s chivalric fantasy is more Aragonese than Castilian in nature.

Just as DQ is about to take leave of the Duke and Duchess, Doña Rodríguez enters the palatial hall with her daughter. The narrator tells us that Rodríguez is acting independently, that this is not another trick by the nobles or their staff. Rodríguez speaks “en fabla,” that is, according to the old chivalric dialect preferred by DQ. She demands that DQ force the Duke to marry his vassal to her daughter: “because to expect the Duke my lord to do justice by me is to ask an elm tree for pears.” When the Duke accedes to the duel, he uses legalistic, contractual language. Rodríguez and her daughter must agree that all their claims against him will be resolved by DQ: “they place their right to justice in Sir Don Quijote’s hands.”

The formal “challenge,” or repto, issued by DQ embodies the social transition from feudalism to the early modern bourgeois world that we have been tracing. Plays like Guillén de Castro’s Las mocedades del Cid (1618) or Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) also mark the domestication of the nobility at the courts of early modern autocrats (cf. Norbert Elias’s The Court Society). In these works, the aristocratic right to settle differences by duels makes a final appearance before it yields to the bureaucratic functionalism of the modern state.

Cha

pte

r 52



We see something similar in this chapter. It’s a reworking of Don Fernando’s submission to Dorotea’s claims in DQ 1, although at a lower social level. On one hand, DQ formulates his challenge in noble, Virgilian terms: “the principal purpose of my profession is to pardon the humble and punish the proud.” And the Duke vows to provide “a proper field... applying his justice equally to both parties, as all princes who provide a free field to all those who duel in their realms are obligated to do.” On the other hand, DQ comically admits that Rodríguez’s claim on behalf of her daughter is pathetic: “it would have been easier not to have been so gullible as to believe the promises of lovers.” Moreover, DQ actually breaks the rules of chivalry. Technically, he is not allowed to challenge a man who is not at least an hidalgo like himself, and so: “I renounce my hidalgo caste, and I lower and adjust myself to the commoner status of the offender, and I make myself his equal, thus giving him the right to enter into combat with me.” Then, because the young man is absent, the narrator tells us that the Duke “accepted the challenge in the name of his vassal.”

So we have a chain of social confrontations: Rodríguez’s daughter is from the lowest caste, an illegitimate laborer, although she claims pure Christian blood; DQ is from the lowest caste of nobility; and the Duke and Duchess are from the high nobility. If we think back to Rodríguez’s story in DQ 2.48, here she seems to be demanding justice for her daughter via DQ as a means of avenging her husband’s death. The Duchess’s reaction emphasizes this formal conflict: “the Duchess ordered that from that moment forward they were not to be treated like her servants but, rather, as enterprising ladies who had come to her house seeking justice.”



LESS

ON

10

Teresa Panza’s second letterE choing the social tensions on display, the page now arrives with Teresa Panza’s letters to the Duchess and SP. The Duchess

allows the first letter to be read aloud. Teresa informs her that SP’s fortune amazes everyone: “in this town everyone thinks that my husband is an idiot, and, outside of governing a tribe of goats, they can’t imagine what sort of government he

could be good for.” Teresa again reveals her obsession with money and status: “I am determined... when going to court to lean back in a carriage so as to pop the eyes of the thousand envious neighbors that I have; and, thus, I request that your excellency tell my husband to send me a little money, and let it be enough, for the expenses at court are great.” For a third time, she dreams of the effect of riding in a coach: “it being inevitable that many ask: ‘Who are the ladies in that carriage?,’ and that a servant of mine respond: ‘The wife and daughter of Sancho Panza, Governor of the Isle of Barataria.’” Finally, hinting at DQ’s speech in DQ 1.11 and the fallen “golden age” we are witnessing here, Teresa apologizes for the meager acorns that she has sent the Duchess –“this year they have not picked acorns in this town”– and then she asks her to keep in touch: “Your magnificence shouldn’t forget to write to me.” Is this a knowing wink or is Teresa being as crude as SP?

Manifesting a rude invasion of SP’s privacy, DQ now agrees to open and read the second letter. Teresa’s letter to SP continues to contrast nobles and the masses: “when I came to hear that you are a governor, I thought I might fall down dead from delight... Sanchica, your daughter, pissed herself without even knowing it from pure pleasure.” Again: “who would have thought that a goatherd was to rise to be a governor of isles?” Teresa makes an odd reference to her hope that SP will rise at least to the status of a tax collector. This recalls Cervantes’s own job as a tax collector for the Armada in the 1580s; it also recalls the taxman whom the



cross-dressed girl claimed was her father during SP’s rounds at night in DQ 2.49. Teresa is brutally honest about the corruption of these officials: “my plan is to see you made a collector of the wool tax or sales taxes, which are offices that if abused can send a person straight to Hell, but, after all, they always have and are handling money.” Teresa then thanks SP for the tunic for Sanchica’s dress, repeats that she wishes she could have sent better acorns to the Duchess –“I wish they could be made of gold”–, and asks SP to send her pearls “if they are worn on that isle.”

Finally, Teresa reports a series of anecdotal details about life in her town. The first hints at Cervantes’s antimonarchical attitude and harkens back to the Comuneros Rebellion against Charles V. A man was hired to “to paint the coat of arms of His Majesty above the doors of the town council.” In the end, “he didn’t paint anything, saying that he was no good at painting such trash.” This sounds like Cervantes himself with a hint of the Cincinnatus myth, for the painter returned the money and became a farmer: “he has abandoned the brush and taken up the hoe, and he goes into the fields like a gentleman.” The second story is religiously irreverent. The son of Pedro de Lobo has entered the priesthood, but “Minguilla, the granddaughter of Mingo Silbato,” claims Lobo is the father of her child. Next, Teresa takes a swipe at the army and the town’s prostitutes: “A company of soldiers passed through here: on their way they took three of the town’s lasses with them.” By contrast, Teresa then reveals that her daughter is generating income and saving money toward her dowry: “Sanchica is doing some lace embroidery; each day she clears eight maravedís, which she is setting aside in a money box to help with her dowry.” Finally, lightning has struck the town’s stocks and the well has dried up, but she doesn’t care.



LESS

ON

11

Sancho resignsN ow we transition to the end of the reign of SP, “flower and mirror for all insular governors.” Chapter fifty-three describes

the invasion of Barataria by enemy forces and SP’s subsequent resignation. Note how frequently Cide Hamete intrudes in these chapters. Here the narrator gives us a direct quote of what the “Mohammedan philosopher” has to say about how

time cannot be stopped: “only human life rushes after its fleeting end more than the wind.” Hamete poetically alludes to Job 7.6-7, which also compares life to the weaving of textiles. Here also, the narrator makes a strange concession to Muslims’ ability to reason “without the enlightenment of faith, only by the light of their natural intelligence.” This is big. Is Hamete a rationalist? an atheist? an Averroist? The narrator then turns our attention to “the rapidity with which the governorship of Sancho ended, was consumed, dissolved itself, and vanished in shadow and smoke.” This is typical baroque discourse: life is a dream and all things come to an end.

Next comes another enactment of war, like those we have seen elsewhere, such as in the hills between the two towns proud of their braying, or in the woods near the ducal palace. War comes to Barataria in the dark of night. SP wakes up to “infinite trumpets and drums” and emerges to find “more than twenty people with burning torches in their hands and with their swords unsheathed.” They are in panic: “To arms, to arms, Sir Governor, to arms, for infinite enemies have infiltrated the isle, and we are lost if your industry and valor do not save us!” SP contrasts himself with his master: “These things would be better left to my master Don Quijote.” He’s not up to the task. His servants throw two shields on him like a turtle: “He ended up like a Galapagos tortoise, enclosed and concealed between his shells.” The lights go out, SP is trampled, and someone stands on his shell and shouts orders for the defense of the palace. When all seems lost, victory is declared and attributed to SP: “Victory, victory, our enemies flee in defeat!... by the valor of that invincible arm!” But SP faints and resolves to leave.



The shift from the hectic, panic of war to SP’s slow, resigned withdrawal is a touching scene: “He fell silent, and without saying another word he began to dress himself, as if entombed in silence, and everyone watched him, waiting to see what the end result would be.” His tragedy becomes a spectacle. Of course, his only concern is his ass, whom he humanizes to an incredible degree: “he went to the stable, with everyone who was there following him, and going up to his gray he hugged him and gave him a peaceful kiss on his forehead, and, not without tears in his eyes, he spoke to him: ‘Come here you, my compadre and my friend and sharer of my labors and my sufferings: when I was with you and had no other thoughts than those that attended to my efforts to mend your trappings and feed your chubby body, blessed were my hours, days, and years; but since I left you and climbed the towers of ambition and pride, my soul has been penetrated by a thousand miseries, a thousand labors, and four thousand misgivings.’” And so SP departs: “Make way, my lords, and let me return to my customary liberty of yore: let me depart in search of my past life, so that I might be reborn from this state of death... Much better for me to have a sickle in my hand than the scepter of a governor.”

This is a huge moment: SP’s political experiment culminates in cynicism. Thus, SP’s speech alludes to a motif from Horace: “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis” or “Blessed is the man who stays away from business.” It’s also an echo of DQ’s niece arguing with her uncle: “Would it not be better to remain peacefully at home?” (DQ 1.7). And looking ahead, it’s an anticipation of Voltaire’s Candide insisting that we should all take care of our garden. In Spain, SP’s retreat from politics anticipates philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s famous “Bene fac loco illi quo natus est” or “Improve the place into which you were born.” Finally, SP’s abdication of power is another echo of the Cincinnatus myth that would become so popular among the American founders.

Two final points about the end of SP’s governorship. First, he twice emphasizes his total lack of corruption: “I have governed like an angel.” If we are skeptical, then Cervantes’s point seems much like James Madison’s view in Federalist 51: precisely because people are not angels, the powers of government must be limited. SP even refuses to submit himself to the traditional juicio de residencia or “review of time in office,” claiming that only the Duke can judge him. This sure sounds like corruption. Second, in a symbolic gesture, Pedro Recio offers SP a medicine that recalls the balsam of Fierabrás in DQ 1.10: “I will prepare your grace a drink to protect against falls and thrashings.” But SP refuses: “Tarde piache! Too late!... I’d sooner become a Turk than not leave.” It would appear that there’s no absolute cure to political problems. War, poverty, crime, corruption, and tyranny are facts of human existence.




The novel’s epistolary turn draws our attention through a sequence of frames and perspectives that are as complex as ever. Back and forth we go between the Duke and Duchess’s court and Sancho’s. We see the importance of humility in politics, but we also see how the law itself is a riddle, a kind of paradox that seeks to regulate human action so much that it risks provoking inaction. These chapters also provide a close look at the social dynamism of early modern Spain. The lower castes are mobile; the nobility in decline. DQ is at the center of it all, trapped between Doña Rodríguez and the Duke and Duchess. Finally, what do we make of the invasion of SP’s island? Like DQ’s earlier allusion to Clavileño as a Trojan horse, the invasion of Barataria likely refers to the Morisco problem. SP can’t handle the violent truth of politics and resigns himself to obscurity. His strange metaphor combines the ant of Rojas’s prologue to La Celestina with Apuleius’s ass in The Golden Ass: “Let the wings of the ant stay in the stable.” All SP wants is some normal shoes, which adds irony to his stupid law fixing the price of shoes. It’s a tragic end to SP’s dream of ruling over a happy republic (Cf. Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men). The only solution is the Cincinnatus myth: return to the farm. Two final points: 1) in another nod to the moral of Apuleius’s novel, SP humanizes his ass more than anywhere else in the novel; 2) Cide Hamete Benengeli’s interventions are growing, as he provides major commentary in chapters 48, 50, 52, 53, and 54. As we shall see, Cervantes’s treatment of the Morisco question is reaching a climax

Let’s review

“I will only say that I do not know if human misery can be portrayed with more realism than to see so many people leaving in such confusion, with the cries of women and children so burdened by obstacles and difficulties... and truth be told, if these people have sinned, then they are paying for it dearly.”

—Don Juan de Austria, Letter 6 November 1570



LESS

ON

12

RicoteC hapters fifty-four and fifty-five of DQ 2 are crucial to understanding Cervantes’s art of the novel. Here, more than anywhere

else, our author combines two symbols: 1) the ass as the mistreated human beings of Apuleius’s anti-slavery picaresque The Golden Ass; and 2) the cave as the state of unenlightened philosophical ignorance in the political allegory of Plato’s Republic.

First, note chapter fifty-four’s ridiculous subtitle: “Which deals with things pertaining to this story and no other.” It’s absurd and comedic, but it also signals this chapter as fundamental. Ironically, the narrator cuts from SP’s abdication of political power to events at the ducal palace. It turns out that the Duke’s vassal, whom Doña Rodríguez wants to marry her daughter, is in Flanders, a subversive allusion to Spain’s most costly imperial adventure in the Low Countries, where Cervantes’s own brother Rodrigo had died in battle in 1600. So a young lackey named Tosilos (a reference to Toxilo, a slave in Plautus’s play The Persian) must take the vassal’s place in the joust with DQ. In stark contrast to SP’s tragic reaction to the invasion of Barataria, DQ is now eager to prove “the valor of his mighty arm.”

Then we switch from the ducal palace back to SP. Notice again Cervantes’s inclusive use of the first person plural: “Let us let those things pass, as we have left other things pass, and go join the company of Sancho, who, both happy and sad, came riding atop his gray in search of his master.” Here, Cervantes confronts our fallen governor with the great moral and political issue of the day, the Expulsion of the Morisco population from southern Spain, which had taken place between 1609 and 1614. Now we understand the reason for the weird date of SP’s letter to Teresa way back in DQ 2.36. Leaving Barataria, SP meets six pilgrims who ask him for alms. Note that the narrator cites Cide Hamete’s description of SP as “charitable” when he gives the pilgrims bread and cheese. When they ask for money, speaking German –“Gueld! Gueld!”–, he indicates with signs that he has none. German foregrounds the issue of the Habsburg Empire.

Cha

pte

r 54



At this point the novel’s major Morisco character appears and, from the ground, he hugs SP about the waist, recalling SP and DQ in the fulling mills episode. Speaking perfect Castilian –“in a clear and very Castilian voice”– the man recognizes his old friend: “Is it possible that I have in my arms that great friend of mine, that good neighbor of mine, Sancho Panza?” At first, SP does not recognize him, and Cervantes uses this problem to emphasize the Morisco theme: “How is it possible, Sancho Panza, brother, that you do not recognize your neighbor Ricote the Morisco, the shopkeeper in your village?” Now SP hugs him back in a notably awkward way: “without dismounting, he threw his arms around his neck.” Three points here: 1) Ricote and SP are neighbors, apparently good friends; 2) SP indicates that Ricote is in danger if he is discovered –“if they catch you and recognize you, it will go very badly for you”–; 3) and finally, the Morisco is a shopkeeper. Cervantes signals that the Expulsion of the Moriscos has been morally tragic as well as economically devastating.

Ricote and his company are friendly: “they are very amicable folk.” SP and Ricote leave the “the royal highway” in order to converse in private, and Ricote tells SP “that which happened to me after I left our village, in obedience of the decree of His Majesty, which threatened the unfortunates of my nation so severely, as you know.” This is huge. Some historians put the figure of expelled Moriscos as high as 300,000. The justification of their expulsion was formulated in terms of the Machiavellian “reason of state”: Spain was threatened externally by the Turks and the Moriscos were considered internal enemies, a potential fifth column. If Cervantes saw the expulsion as necessary, and this is hotly debated, then, at the very least, Ricote represents an exception that calls the policy into question. He is SP’s neighbor, but his name also refers to the Valle de Ricote in Murcia, famous for the loyalty and Christian faith of its Morisco population. In fact, these were the last Moriscos to be expelled from Spain. They were initially granted an exemption and only when the local oligarchy insisted on expropriating their property were they finally sent to the Barbary Coast in 1614.

The ironies of this scene are thick. First, Ricote and his friends are the antithesis of Pedro Recio. They offer SP a generous banquet, complete with bread, salt, nuts, cheese, ham, olives, and even caviar, which Cervantes describes in detail: “They also offered a black delicacy, which they say is called caviar and is made from the eggs of fish.” Finally, on one hand, if the Moriscos only suck the ham bones, which hints at their Islamic beliefs, on the other hand, they go against their faith by drinking a lot of wine: “But what most won the day on that field of a banquet were six wineskins, for each of them took one from their saddlebags... and then, straightaway and all together, they raised their arms with wineskins in the air: with their mouths on the openings and their eyes fixed on the sky, it seemed no less than that they were aiming at it.” Note the painful contrast between sharing a meal and being at war, between drinking wine and aiming guns.



“Gueld! Gueld!”

The irony continues as the narrator cites a popular ballad about Nero, who watched “how Rome burned,” in order to describe SP, who “suffered not from anything.” This contrasts our governor as a potential tyrant with our squire as such a friend of Moriscos that he does not worry about being a Roman Catholic. It even turns the Inquisition’s attempts to burn people like Ricote back against the institution, because by violently betraying Christian ideals, what gets burned is Rome itself. And at this very moment, SP joins the drunken orgy: “he asked Ricote for the wineskin and took his aim like the rest of them.” Next, Cervantes reveals the political bond between Spain and the German House of Habsburg as a lie, a sign of hypocrisy. Our Old Christian squire bonds with his Morisco hosts, who, for their part, pretend to be Germans. Notice that both SP and the Moriscos speak the Mediterranean lingua franca that was so important in “The Captive’s Tale” of DQ 1.39-41: “Now and again one of them would grasp Sancho’s right hand and say: ‘Español y tudesqui, tuto uno: bon compaño.’ And Sancho would reply: ‘¡Bon compaño, jura Di!’” The Moriscos mean: “Spaniards and Germans, united together: good friends.” SP means: “Good friends, I swear by God!” Note also how the following description of SP subverts war and government with laughter and feasting: “And he fired off volleys of laughter for an hour, forgetting all about what had happened to him during his governorship, because our cares have little jurisdiction regarding the timing and duration of food and drink.” Finally, note that Ricote speaks perfect Spanish: “Ricote, without the slightest sign of his Morisco language, addressed the following words to him in pure Castilian.” Is this a man who deserves expulsion?



LESS

ON

13

“Freedom of conscience”N ow, what Ricote tells SP is one of Cervantes’s most problematic passages. Given the social bonding on display, it’s difficult

to take the apologetic tone of Ricote’s description of the policy of expulsion seriously. First, he underscores the terror caused by “the proclamation and edict which His Majesty ordered to be issued against those of my nation.” But then

he endorses Felipe III’s decision, using the same logic and metaphors that were used to justify the policy: “it seems to me that it was divine inspiration that moved His Majesty to enact such a noble resolution, not because all of us were guilty, for some were Christians true and firm, but because these were so few that they could not oppose those who were not, and it was not good to harbor the snake so near the heart, allowing the enemy inside the house. In the end, with just reason we were punished with the penalty of exile, moderate and lenient in the opinion of some, but in ours the most terrible that could befall us.”

What is going on here? At the very least, Ricote evinces a Stockholm syndrome by sympathizing with his persecutors. Regarding Cervantes’s intentions, the inherent goodness of Ricote trumps his own endorsement of the expulsion. I could be wrong, of course. It might be more accurate to say that the irony and perspectivism of Cervantes’s complex narrative disallows easy conclusions about these types of issues. And note again the timelessness of Cervantes’s fiction. Look at Europe’s Muslim immigration problem. History does not repeat itself; but it rhymes. And even so, there are no easy answers.

Things get more tragic and more complicated. Ricote describes the agony of the Moriscos: “Wherever we are we cry for Spain,” because “it is our natural homeland” and “love for one’s country is sweet.” He then relates his journey through France and Italy on his way to Germany. In fact, Ricote now lives in the very place after which the Habsburgs take their name: “I took a house in a town near Augsburg.” We read another hotly debated passage when Ricote claims that in Germany he is not persecuted for his religious



beliefs: “I reached Germany, and there it seemed to me that one could live with more liberty because the inhabitants do not pry into the lives of others: each lives as he wishes, because in most places one lives with freedom of religious conscience.” Note how this idea anticipates the fundamental importance of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

More agony. We learn that Ricote has been separated from his wife and daughter, who are in Árgel. And SP faces one final social and economic predicament. Ricote claims his wife and daughter are “Catholic Christians,” and yet he admits that he himself is ambivalent: “and even though I am not so committed, I am still more Christian than Moor, and I always pray to God that he open the eyes of my understanding and let me know how best to serve him.” Remember this Neoplatonic take on theology. Ricote wants God to show him the light of how to be a proper Christian. The problem facing SP is that Ricote proposes that his friend help him recover his buried treasure so that he can rescue his family from Algiers: “if you want, Sancho, to come with me and help me dig it up and hide it, I will give you two hundred escudos, with which you can remedy your needs, and you know that I know that you have many.” Note that, figuratively speaking, the ethical dilemma of DQ 1, the issue of the 100 escudos that Carrasco brought up in DQ 2.3-4, has now been doubled. And note how the theft of Cardenio’s money by SP now relates to the expropriation of the Moriscos by the Spanish Crown, the Inquisition, and the local oligarchs and Old Christians who supported the policy of expulsion.

Like “Sancho the slaver” in DQ 1, “Sancho the governor” in DQ 2 disappoints modern readers. He refuses to help Ricote. Even if the Morisco were to pay him double, and upfront and in cash, he says he will not betray his king: “because it would seem to me treachery to my king to favor of his enemies, I would not go with you, even if, as you just promised to give me two hundred escudos, you were now to offer me four hundred and in cash.” Moreover, he claims that he is not greedy –“I am in no way avaricious”–, offering as proof the fact that he has not embezzled money from his time in office. Given SP’s constant interest in money, get-rich-quick schemes, and salaries, do we believe him?

At the end of chapter fifty-four, Ricote asks about SP’s governorship, hilariously pointing out that “there are no isles on terra firma.” SP insists he has governed “like a Sagittarius,” alluding to Chiron, the teacher of Achilles, again referring to the classical genre of princely advice manuals that are a major theme of DQ 2. Ricote tells SP to drop his fantastical talk of governing islands and embrace the option of helping him recover his treasure. At this point, SP says “be content that I will not expose you,” alluding to the fact that he risks six years in the galleys for helping a Morisco. Finally, Ricote asks if SP has news of his family and SP reports that a certain Don Pedro Gregorio was courting Ricote’s daughter. Cervantes’s favorite theme of lovers with different social statuses: Gregorio is not only an Old Christian Spaniard, he is also the firstborn of a wealthy family: “that rich young heir.” Ricote expresses confidence that “Moriscas rarely, if ever, get mixed up in love with Old Christians” and SP sympathizes given the political circumstances: “May God make it so... for it would go bad for both of them.” Then SP and Ricote hug once more and go their separate ways.



LESS

ON

14

Sancho and his ass fall into a caveC hapter fifty-five offers poetic and political justice for the governor who has refused to help his friend. Note another absurdly

redundant subtitle: “On things that happened to Sancho on the road, and others which simply have to be seen.” The emphasis on vision is important. Remember the cave allegory in Plato’s Republic and the metaphor of the ass as a human

being in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The brutal irony is that SP now shows great concern for his ass, which grows human in this episode, whereas he has just repressed his natural sympathy for his neighbor.

Let’s deal first with the Apuleian aspect of the episode. SP’s concern is constant and the ass is a fluid figure. When he falls into the pit, SP complains, “especially when he heard his gray painfully and tenderly moaning.” SP speaks about himself in the third person and uses a suggestive quiasmus: “Sancho Panza never abandoned his ass, nor his ass Sancho Panza.” He helps the ass stand up and feeds it, and he addresses it “as if he could understand.” Think of it this way: the ass is Ricote, and Cervantes models SP’s strange concern for his ass after those characters in Apuleius’s novel who praise Lucius the ass, who is really a human being: “Oh, friend and companion of mine, how poorly I have paid you for your good services! Forgive me... for I promise to place a crown of laurel atop your head, such that you will seem nothing less than a poet laureate, and to double your feed rations.” SP makes sure his ass can move through the pit: “he made room so that the ass could easily pass through.” When DQ appears at an opening above, SP specifies that his ass is with him, and, according to the narrator: “And there’s more, for it seems no less than that the ass understood what Sancho said, for at that moment he began to bray with force, such that the whole cave reverberated.” When SP is freed, he first makes sure his ass is comfortable: “he refused to go up to greet the Duke without first seeing the gray accommodated in the stable.” If you still think SP’s ass is just a comical detail, then you are a philistine; but you are in good company, because most of Cervantes’s editors and commentators agree with you.

Cha

pte

r 55



Now let’s look at the episode’s allusions to Plato’s cave. The context of the episode is darkness: SP travels in “the night somewhat dark and gloomy”; and he falls into “a deep and most dark chasm.” Interesting here are the “old structures” that frame the hole. It’s as if SP has fallen into that primitive darkness out of which all civilizations attempt to escape; or perhaps he has fallen into that primitive darkness between two ancient civilizations at war. The latter seems plausible because when SP checks himself, like DQ did after the Battle of the Brayers in DQ 1.27, the former governor finds himself “good, whole, and in catholic health.”

Next, SP contrasts his predicament with his master’s: “I won’t be as fortunate as my lord Don Quijote of La Mancha when he descended and went down into the cave of that enchanted Montesinos.” He spends the night in the pit. Day brings “clarity and splendor,” but SP is still trapped. He spies “a ray of sunshine” and moves toward “a confused spot of clarity” at the other end of the cave. Midway through the episode, as we saw in the Cave of Montesinos, and more recently in DQ’s concern for Rodríguez, the theme of Purgatory returns. SP shouts for help: “Is there a Christian who can hear me?” DQ is prepared to rescue souls: “if you are a soul doing penance, tell me what you want me to do on your behalf.” There is humor here as SP has to repeatedly insist that he is still alive. DQ offers an hilarious citation of Catholic doctrine: “if you are my squire, Sancho Panza, and you have died, so long as the devils have not taken you, and by the mercy of God you are in Purgatory, then Our Holy Mother the Roman Catholic Church has enough intercessory prayers that can save you from the suffering in which you find yourself.” Recall that Protestantism rejects this idea. Also recall Ricote’s ambivalence about his faith and the mockery of Catholic orthodoxy elsewhere in the novel. This is a big moment.

The cave is also Platonic to the degree that it is political. The episode begins with a political version of the ubi sunt topic inherited from Cicero and popular during the Middle Ages (cf. Jorge Manrique). SP: “Who would have said that he who yesterday saw himself enthroned as governor of an isle, giving orders to his servants and his vassals, would today find himself entombed in a chasm?” Like the last Visigothic King Rodrigo, SP will only find “snakes and toads” in the pit. Remember DQ’s anecdote about Charles V at the Pantheon in Rome in DQ 2.8. Has someone figuratively pushed SP from the cima or “peak” of the dome into this sima or “pit”? SP himself says this is political punishment: “a sinner buried alive, an unfortunate ungoverned governor.” And once he escapes the pit, SP asserts that he governed honestly: “neither did I have time to take any bribes or charge any fees... I arrived naked, and naked I find myself now: I neither lost nor gained.” To paraphrase Hamlet, the governor “doth protest too much, methinks.” The narrator reports that the Duke plans to compensate SP: “he would arrange to grant him another office in his territory, one less onerous and more lucrative.”



Cervantes’s innovation on Plato is that the cave also represents ethnic fusion. SP claims DQ would experience it as if it were “the palaces of Galiana,” alluding to the legend of a Moorish princess of Toledo who fell in love with Charlemagne. Moreover, at this moment, Benengeli intrudes and tells us how DQ came across SP’s cave while out preparing for his joust. The narrator continues to weave together the political and ethnic symbolism of ass, cave, and light: “at the cost of many people and much work they raised the gray and Sancho Panza out from that darkness and into the light of the sun. A student saw him and said: ‘This is how all wicked governors should leave their governments: just like this sinner leaves the depths of the abyss, starving to death, pale, and without a blanca to his name, as far as I can tell.’” SP’s version is similar but more concise: “I left, as I was saying, I left that isle without any other company than that of my ass; I fell into a chasm, and I made my way through it until this morning, with the light of the sun, when I saw the way out.” More cynicism appears in the Duke’s plan to grant SP another office and SP’s description of governing as a child’s game, something like hop frog or four corners: “like that game played by children when they shout ‘Your jump, and now give to me,’ I jump out of the government and I pass into the service of my lord Don Quijote.’”



LESS

ON

15

The battle betweenDon Quijote and TosilosC hapter fifty-six echoes the vision theme via its playful subtitle –“Concerning the gigantic and never seen battle”– and in

the joust’s early details: “infinite people who were hoping to see the severe and never seen encounter.” It’s an extension of the Plato’s cave symbolism in the previous chapter. It’s also important to note that Cervantes frames the combat between

DQ and the lackey Tosilos with the official ban on dueling. The Duke removes the iron tips of the jousters’ lances as a precaution and tells DQ to be satisfied that the Duke is allowing this event, even though “it went against the decree by the Holy Council which prohibits such challenges.” Remember that from the nobility’s perspective, it’s a fallen world. Chivalry is dead on many levels. Similarly, Rocinante is always pathetic, and now Tosilos arrives atop a workhorse from the Low Countries. The mundane detail also refers to the Habsburgs’ use of Spaniards to repress that region.

In the end, Tosilos falls in love with Rodríguez’s daughter, who becomes “the lady of his liberty.” Cervantes offers a detailed description of Eros, or “Love,” piercing Tosilos’s heart with an arrow. It’s comedic, but it’s also a Neoplatonic view of the mechanics of love. More importantly, Tosilos’s formal declaration of surrender is an idealistic articulation of how to resolve social and ethnic conflict: “I say that I recognize having been defeated and that I wish to marry that lady immediately... I do not want to achieve through disputes and battles what I can achieve peacefully and with no risk of death.” This contrasts with the Duke, who at first “remained shocked and extremely angry.” But even the Duke is eventually satisfied, perhaps because, instead of the son of his vassal, a mere lackey will marry Rodríguez’s daughter. Three final points: 1) DQ’s rare religiosity echoes Vivaldo’s objections to the heresy of knights errant in DQ 1.13. Awaiting combat, DQ properly entrusts “all of his heart to Our Lord God and to his lady Dulcinea of Toboso.” Later, he even blesses Tosilo’s marriage with religious language: “since Our Lord God has granted it to you, may Saint Peter bless it for you.” 2) The metamorphosis theme reappears. Rodríguez and her daughter object to the “transformations” of a rich man into a lackey. But DQ and SP act as mediators and Rodríguez’s daughter is happy in the end: “I would rather be the legitimate wife of a lackey than the deceived mistress of a nobleman.” 3) All this religious respect and social cohesion contrasts with the sadistic disappointment of the masses: “all proclaimed victory for Don Quijote, and most of them went away sad and melancholy at seeing that the two combatants they had waited for with such anticipation had not hacked one another to bits, just like when boys are disappointed when the man they are waiting to see hanged does not appear because either the other party or the court has pardoned him.” What to do about the masses? Morality is the last thing on their minds.

Cha

pte

r 56






The ass and the cave, along with vision and metamorphosis, are the major symbols and themes of these chapters. Simultaneously, the Morisco problem comes into greater focus. Nothing is simple; the expulsion might have been necessary. However, Cervantes signals other ways of escaping the potential darkness of ethnic conflict: commerce, dining, and gift-giving are ways of recognizing shared values. Whether Ricote is Christian or not, he is certainly kind to our former governor. But the tensions between Islam and Christianity during Inquisitional Spain were no simpler than they are today. Finally, note the happy ending, the “transformation,” represented by the marriage between Tosilos and Rodríguez’s daughter, whose name, curiously, we never learn. Tosilos’s metamorphosis echoes Carrasco’s role as the Knight of the Mirrors in DQ 2.14, and we’ll see this narrative tactic applied to DQ himself in a future episode. Again, Cervantes proposes some sort of metamorphosis as a solution to social conflict. By contrast, note the disappointment of the masses, who had hoped for bloody combat like young boys thrilled at the idea of a hanging. Cervantes may be a humanist, but he does not appear to be a populist.

Let’s review

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

—Acts 9.3-4



LESS

ON

16

Don Quijote and Sancho are escorted to the ducal palaceC hapter fifty-seven of DQ 2 narrates DQ and SP’s departure from the ducal palace. Its humor centers on Altisidora’s complaint

via a ballad she sings in front of everyone present. The narrator opens by underscoring DQ’s intense desire to depart: “he imagined that allowing his person to be enclosed and idle was a great error.” He twice repeats the term ociosidad,

meaning “leisure” or “idleness” and alluding to the abstract Latin concept of “otium.” The significance of this term in DQ would require a dissertation, but we can make four points. First, DQ’s unoccupied state reflects back on the reader who was addressed as “idle reader” in the first prologue of 1605. Second, adding to this circular effect, we recall that at the beginning of his first sally, DQ expressed the same anxiety regarding the world’s need for him: “spurring him on was the need that he thought was caused in the world by his delay” (DQ 1.2). Third, during the Renaissance, “otium,” a concept inherited from Cicero and Petrarch, was a positive humanist ideal associated with intellectual refinement and learning about nature and man. But because humanists were often advisors to dukes and kings, the term has political connotations, and in princely advice manuals, it could have negative connotations: too much thinking can lead to melancholy and an inability to act. Ironically, near the end of part two, as DQ becomes more reflective, he becomes more melancholy. Finally, both classical nobles and the modern merchants regarded a person’s work, or “negotium,” as the negation of her “otium.”

Cha

pte

r 57



Speaking of politics, for his part, SP’s capacity for corruption is the other major theme in chapter fifty-seven. He constantly refers to his impeccable reign, even insisting that his wife’s gift of acorns to the Duchess cannot implicate him in any dishonesty: “I am consoled by the fact that this gift cannot be called a bribe, because I was already governor when she sent them.” And again: “In effect, I entered government naked and I leave it naked, and thus I will be able to say with a clear conscience, which is no small thing: ‘I was born naked, and naked I still am: I have neither lost nor gained.’” SP please! DQ is a weird text, but SP’s obsession has become meaningfully absurd. Cervantes again alludes to the motif of the provisional leader who serves the state, but then returns to his normal life. American readers should recognize the Cincinnatus legend so popular among the Founders, many of whom, by the way, were avid readers of DQ.

An interesting detail undercuts SP’s claims of innocence: “Sancho was atop his ass, with his saddlebags, case, and provisions, overjoyed because the Duke’s majordomo, the one who had been Trifaldi, had given him a small purse with two hundred gold escudos to cover the costs of the trip, and Don Quijote still knew nothing of this.” WOW! What did SP do to deserve this money? Recall that SP turned down this exact sum from Ricote. And why are we told that DQ is still unaware of this? DQ seems unknowingly implicated in SP’s corruption.

‘I was born naked, and naked I still am: I have

neither lost nor gained.’”



LESS

ON

17

Altisidora’s complaint

T he complaint sung by Altisodora is another of Cervantes’s burlesque ballads. The refrain is hyperbolic: “Cruel Vireno, fugitive Aeneas, / go with Barabbas, you belong with him.” But notice how this transmits two ideas: first, amorous betrayal, for Vireno and Aeneus abandoned Olimpia and Dido in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Virgil’s Aeneid; second, defiant theft, for

according to the gospels, Barabbas was a bandit and a rebel released by Pontius Pilate before the crucifixion of Jesus. A moral and political transgression has occurred. At first glance, Altisidora’s ballad is silly: she mocks DQ’s horse –“your poorly governed beast”–, she exaggerates her sexual attractiveness –“the most beautiful damsel / that Diana ever saw in her woods, / or that Venus spied in her forest”–, she accuses DQ of having stolen three nightcaps and several garters from her –“You have taken three nightcaps / and the garters off certain legs”–, and she even wishes him misfortune at cards and hopes that if he ever gets his molars pulled, they break off at the roots. As the son of a dentist, I can tell you that is a terrible thing to wish on someone.

But Altisidora’s song is also damming in four ways. First, equating DQ with Aeneas, who escaped Troy but also abandoned Dido, is an anti-imperial gesture inherited from the poet Garcilaso. Second, when Altisidora curses Dulcinea, she says “for the just perhaps / pay for sinners in my land,” which, as we saw in DQ 1.7, voices Cervantes’s main criticism of the Inquisition. Third, she accuses DQ of having stolen her heart, her nightcaps, and her garters by using his garras or “claws” and his cerras or “hands.” But in slang these terms also mean “thefts” and “bags,” alluding to SP’s “small purse with two hundred gold escudos.” Finally, according to the tortured grammar of the second stanza, Altisidora describes not her garters but her own legs as “black and white,” bringing up the issue of race

again. So, Altisidora’s ballad attacks the iconography of Habsburg imperialism, alludes to the injustice of the Inquisition, accuses both DQ and SP of robbery, and hints at an erotic miscegenation rejected by DQ. In short, the broken love affair between Altisidora and DQ is yet another of the novel’s allegories for the Morisco problem. And beyond Rocinante, the “poorly governed beast” surely refers to governor SP’s rucio as well as the Trojan horse Clavileño, which ultimately ties everything back to multi-ethnic figures like Aldonza Lorenzo, Zoraida, and most recently Ricote.

The true hilarity of the episode, and more proof of Cervantes’s comic genius, occurs at the end of Altisodora’s song, in the narrator’s description of DQ’s reaction: “During the time that sad Altisidora complained in the way described, Don Quijote was staring at her, and then, without responding a word to her, he turned toward Sancho and said to him: ‘For the love of your ancestors, dear Sancho, I urge you to tell me the truth. Tell me, have you, by chance, taken the three nightcaps and the garters that this lovesick damsel claims?’” As if DQ’s patient attention to Altisidora’s ballad were not funny enough, his instinct is to accuse SP of having stolen her nightcaps and her garters. And SP’s response?: “I am indeed carrying the three nightcaps, but as for the garters, well, she’s off in the hills of Úbeda.” By this last phrase SP accuses Altisidora of being out of her mind. But we have to ask: how in the world did SP end up with three of her nightcaps?

More humor: the Duke now plays along and insists that DQ should return Altisidora’s garters or else face him in a duel: “if not, then I challenge you to mortal combat.” DQ is caught off guard by all of this, especially the accusation of theft: “I, Sir Duke, have never been a thief, nor do I plan to be one ever in my life.” But is this true? A certain barber and a few goatherds and innkeepers back in the Sierra Morena might disagree. In the end, however, Altisidora confesses that she has lied: “I beg your forgiveness regarding the larceny of the garters, because I swear by God and my soul that I am wearing them, and I must have fallen into that careless state of he who went looking for the ass he was riding.” Notice how Altisidora admits that she is actually wearing the garters. Note too how she uses the precise legalistic term “larceny,” which is the issue of her song and which echoes the essence of Cervantes’s critiques of the Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Moriscos. SP responds that he would never lie about a theft –“As if I would hide stolen things!”–, which we know is a lie. SP also over-emphasizes yet again the purity of his governorship: “For, if had wanted to, I would have had loads of opportunities during my governorship.” And with that, our heroes depart for the capital of Aragón: “heading in the direction of Zaragoza.”

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

—Acts 9.3-4



LESS

ON

18

Liberty and five saints, that’s right, FIVE (5)C hapter fifty-eight has three movements: our heroes’ encounter with four effigies of saints, a delightful pastoral adventure,

and then DQ’s clash with a herd of “fierce bulls.” Before any of these, we read DQ’s famous preamble on the theme of liberty. We have seen the idea of liberty a number of times: 1) as a matter of human dignity in the prologue of DQ 1; 2) as

a problematic aspect of the relationship between master and servant throughout the novel; 3) as a particular feature of Cervantes’s meditations on slavery, both the new trans-Atlantic slave trade as well as Viedma’s enslavement at Algiers. Here DQ pontificates on liberty as an expression of his escape from the restrictive and decadent environment of the ducal palace. But he also elevates the topic to a universal level: “Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that the Heavens gave to men; she is worth more than all the hidden treasures on land and beneath the sea; for liberty, as well as for honor, one can and should risk one’s life, and by contrast, captivity is the worst thing that can happen to men.”

DQ concludes by formulating liberty as freedom from feudal norms: “the obligations to remunerate received benefits and largesse are bonds that restrain the independence of the spirit.” The irony is that his listener, SP, seeks a salary from his master, that is, liberation from the organic, reciprocal bonds between lord and vassal. Or another way, the Duke is to DQ what DQ is to SP. Adding to this irony, SP now lets DQ in on a secret: “Even given... what your mercy has just stated, it’s not good that two hundred gold escudos in a small purse which the Duke’s majordomo gave me should remain without acknowledgement on our part.” SP also notes that compensation means a lot in the modern world: “for we’ll not always find castles where they welcome us; we might come across some inns where they’ll beat us.”

Cha

pte

r 58



DQ and SP now come across a group of twelve men in a “small verdant meadow” (another green locus amoenus) who are transporting four effigies of saints covered by sheets. Once again, vision is the theme as DQ requests a viewing: “If you please... I would like to see them.” Money is also a theme. One of the men specifies the value of the images: “none of them is worth less than fifty ducados; and so that your grace will see the truth of this, just wait, and your grace will see it with your own eyes.” A ducado is slightly more than an escudo, i.e., the images are worth more than the two hundred escudos that SP has just reported as a gift from the Duke.

These saints inevitably relate to DQ’s profession. They are all mounted, i.e., they are Christian knights: George, Martin, James, and Paul. It’s a fascinating series and Cervantes wants us to compare and contrast their value. But which one is the ideal? Two of the saints have political connotations: George is the patron saint of Aragón; James is the famous Moorslayer, patron saint of Spain. Recall that we are approaching Zaragoza and that Aragón was subdued by Philip II in 1591. And recall the Expulsion of the Moriscos carried out in the years prior to the publication of part two. The other two saints represent pacifist alternatives: Martin is famous for sharing half his cloak with a beggar and Paul is famous for having converted to Christianity after being thrown from his horse. Recall that SP was mounted when he encountered Ricote in the guise of a beggar. And recall that DQ cited Paul when he blessed the marriage between Tosilos and Rodríguez’s daughter. The narrator’s descriptions and DQ’s explanations of each mounted saint are part of Cervantes’s game of perspectivism. George is like DQ: “furthermore, he was a defender of damsels.” Martin represents a civilizing trajectory: “more liberal than valiant.” James recalls the Morisco question: “his sword bloody, trampling Moors and crushing their heads.” Paul is the archetypical convert to Christianity: “in his day he was the fiercest enemy had by Our Lord God’s Church and the greatest defender she will ever have.”



If peace is the goal, and Cervantes is criticizing the Expulsion of the Moriscos, then Martin and Paul trump George and James. If Aragón’s freedom is the issue, then George trumps James. But note that SP’s humorous quip about the selfish charity of Martin suggests the mutual advantages of market commerce: “to give and to withhold require wisdom untold.” Moreover, the dialogue circles back to the contrast between peace and war. First SP celebrates the adventure as unique: “we have escaped without any frights or blows, nor have we laid a hand on our swords.” But then he asks why Spaniards evoke James by shouting “Santiago and close for Spain!”: “Is Spain by chance open and in need of closing? What ceremony is that?” DQ pushes the meaning of Santiago further: “this great knight with the crimson cross has been given to Spain by God as her patron and protector, especially in the violent encounters that the Spaniards have had with the Moors, and thus they invoke and call on him as their defender in all the battles they undertake, and often they have visibly witnessed him fighting amongst them, crushing, trampling, destroying, and killing the squadrons of the Hagarenes.”

This meditation on the conflict between Christianity and Islam, with the theological reference to Hagar, deepens the episode’s relation to the Morisco question. If some of the Christian Moriscos are infiltrated by Muslims, then in answer to SP’s query, Spain must resist invasion by its enemies. Questions remain, however. Given the pro-Morisco roles of Aldonza Lorenzo, Zoraida, and Ricote, is this portrait of Santiago negative? Or is it a tragic recognition of the need to expel a possible fifth column? Or could Cervantes be saying that Muslim women should be admitted and Muslim men expelled? It’s hard to tell, and perhaps this is Cervantes’s point. It all depends on your perspective. DQ further highlights the difficulty here by alluding to the Mendoza clan, who were notoriously against the Expulsion of the Moriscos, but then alluding to Scipio Africanus, who represented the Habsburg Kings who carried out the policy.



LEC

CIÓ

N 1

9

The false Arcadia and the ferocious bulls

T he conversation now turns to love. SP asks why Altisidora became enamored of DQ. DQ responds that “Love” is blind, like death. Then he quotes Horace on the equalizing power of death: “it assails the noble fortresses (alcázares) of kings as well as the humble huts of shepherds.” This phrase is clearly important to Cervantes: he cites it in the prologue to DQ 1 as well

as in DQ 2.20. Note the evolution of the phrase from Latin to Spanish, and then the shift from torres or “towers” in DQ 2.20 to the Arabic alcázares or “fortresses” here in DQ 2.58. SP and DQ then discuss the superficial nature of external beauty versus the internal beauty represented by positive values and character, “liberalness” and “good breeding.” Is Cervantes saying that the outward appearance of Moriscos should not obscure their interior Christianity? You decide.

Let’s back up a bit. Another saint surfaces here after the complex review of the effigies. Francis enters the brief discussion of superstition. Francis was famous for his ability to make animals get along. Does this refer to Muslims, Christians, and Jews? Animals are important throughout this episode. We began with horses mounted by different saints; and now we will see birds, dogs, and bulls.

In the midst of their discussion of love, DQ gets caught up in green nets: “Don Quijote found himself tangled up in webs of green thread.” We are approaching an understanding of Cervantes’s use of textiles. DQ recalls the net that Vulcan used to humiliate Venus and Mars, again indicating the conflict between Love and War. Shepherdesses now appear, and their dress is described in great detail: “their skirts were of rich rippled silk shot with gold.” The girls beg DQ not to break the threads of their nets: “Hold your step, Sir Knight, and do not break the nets.” This contrast between our knight and young girls recalls the encounter between the violent warrior and the little girl of Burgos in the Poem of the Cid. Note also how the girls allude to an aristocratic ideal of social harmony. They have come to these woods to role-play a pastoral fantasy: “In a village that is about two leagues from here, where there are many nobles, and



many hidalgos and rich people, a group of family and friends arranged that with our sons, wives, and daughters, neighbors, friends, and family, we should all come to delight in this spot, which is one of the most agreeable in all of these parts, founding together all of us a new pastoral Arcadia.” The explicit references to the poetry of Virgil, Garcilaso, and Camoes echo the theme of a violent world giving way to a peaceful pastoral refuge. Their encampment does likewise: “we have among these trees placed some tents, which they say are called ‘field tents.’”

Now DQ compares himself to Actaeon when he spied Diana (cf. the statues at Caserta). Though he does no mention them, the allusion calls to mind the dogs that devoured Actaeon when Diana transformed him into a stag. Remember the strange dogs in the prologue of DQ 2? Note DQ’s new description of his profession here: “my profession is none other than that of revealing myself to be thankful and a benefactor to all types of people.” He also refers to the global reach of Spain: “if these nets, which occupy only a small space, were to occupy the entire sphere of the earth, I would search for new worlds through which to pass without breaking them.” This intricate conceit refers to the social transition from warrior knight to courtly gentleman, and then to global trade and peace as the proper goals of the Spanish Empire. This Arcadia also includes strong hints at a trans-ethnic ideal. The girls are hunting “all types of little birds, which, fooled by the color of the nets, fell prey to the danger that they were fleeing.” It’s an amazing image, an allusion to the indeterminate color of birds in the exotic, oriental poetry of San Juan de la Cruz.

Now DQ gives his final harangue of the chapter, this time against arrogance and, even more importantly, thanklessness: “The worst among the major sins that men commit, although some say it is pride, I say it is ingratitude.” Finally, he proclaims his plan to perform a feat of honor in recognition of his gratitude to the young girls who invited him to join their pastoral group: “I say that I shall maintain, for two whole days in the middle of this royal highway which leads to Zaragoza, that these counterfeit lady shepherd girls here present are the most beautiful damsels and the most courteous in the world, with the single exception of the peerless Dulcinea of Toboso.” This is amusing, but when SP praises his master’s discretion, DQ inexplicably erupts in anger: “his face inflamed and choleric” and “with great fury and signs of anger.” Contrary to his recent pacific description of his vocation, our mad hidalgo assumes his antiquated militant role again. Like his insane attack of the penitents in DQ 1.52, there’s no obvious reason for DQ’s behavior. Indeed, his Arcadian audience is as confused as the reader: “making them doubt whether they should take him as mad or sane.” But wait. Like his effort to save the Virgin from the penitents, is there not some logic here? DQ’s objection to SP seems crazy: “Who gave you the right to meddle in my things and to determine whether or not I’m intelligent or a fool?” But is affirming and defending the dignity of women really foolish?



Upon closer inspection, DQ’s defense of the beauty and manners of the pastoral girls imitates the “Pass of Honor” alluded to in DQ 1.49. That famous chivalric episode from the fifteenth century involved DQ’s ancestor, Gutierre Quijada. Here, in middle of the road to Zaragoza, we are again invited to contemplate the essence of DQ: “all of the people of the pastoral flock, desirous to find out how far his arrogant and never before seen pledge would lead.” DQ is absurd: “he pierced the air with these kind of pronouncements.” And then come the bulls. Notice that the devil is expressly not involved in this conflict. Instead, according to one of the cattlemen, DQ himself is diabolical: “Get out of the way, you devil, or these bulls will tear you to shreds!” It’s a tragic fall, and, as per the series of saints at the beginning of the chapter, it’s also a Christian fall, like the ultimate lesson of Saul’s conversion to Paul. Thus, afterwards, knight and squire: “with more shame than pleasure, they went on their way.”

“Don Quijote found himself tangled up in webs of

green thread.”






In chapters fifty-seven and fifty-eight, Cervantes resets the basic elements of his novel as we approach its end. Altisidora’s ridiculous protests recall the racial issues associated with Aldonza Lorenzo and she also highlights the issues of theft and injustice associated with the Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Moriscos. The series of saints, with particular emphasis on Santiago Matamoros, does something similar. Which is the ideal Christian knight? Perhaps there is something positive and negative in each of them. The two encounters that follow, first with shepherdesses who hunt multicolored birds with green nets, and then with a heard of bulls being driven through the same space, reposition DQ as both a hero and a problem, a protagonist and an antagonist. Either he can be pacified by a kind of pastoral utopia or he will erupt in violent anger. Perhaps these two states are related? DQ’s effort to assert the honor of the shepherdesses is what leads to his confrontation with the bulls. Cervantes is suggesting that a peaceful, multiethnic civilization cannot exist on its own without police or soldiers to defend it. But shame and self-abnegation are also important themes here. If only we could behave like Saint Martin, who displays charity toward the less fortunate, and also like Santiago, who resists our enemies. But even then, is there not a fundamental paradox in the idea of a Christian knight? And what about Saint George? Is it right to go to war in order to save another culture’s women from its men?

Let’s review

“I sat down, took out some sheets of paper, and began with the first thing that occurred to me, without knowing what would follow, without any sort of plan. My characters will go about constructing themselves according to how they act and speak, above all how they speak; their personalities will form little by little. And sometimes their personality will be that of not having one.”

— Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla



LESS

ON

20

Another “locus amoenus”T hings get very strange in chapter fifty-nine of DQ 2. Our heroes find “a clear and fresh spring” (yet another locus amoenus).

When the squire begins to eat, the hidalgo produces another of his long-winded contrasts between them: “I, Sancho, was born to live by dying and you to die by eating.” DQ’s double paradox encapsulates the contrastive nature of Cervantes’s

project. The first phrase echoes the idea of embracing “life through death” in both medieval courtly love poetry and late renaissance mystical poetry; the second phrase is a comical mockery of them both. As another indication of the darker tone of the 1615 novel, DQ now contemplates suicide: “I think I shall let myself die from hunger, death most cruel of deaths.” SP’s objection is down to earth: “I, at least, have no plan to kill myself; rather, I’d sooner do as the shoemaker does when he pulls at the leather with his teeth until he makes it reach where he wants.” He talks DQ out of suicide –“there is no greater madness than wanting to commit suicide”– and suggests he sleep instead.

The narrator again highlights SP’s wisdom by telling us that DQ thinks “Sancho’s reasoning was more that of a philosopher than an idiot.” Hilariously, DQ tells SP that while his master sleeps, the squire should give himself “three hundred or four hundred lashes toward the three thousand and some odd that you must give yourself for the disenchantment of Dulcinea.” SP remains skeptical and delays the idea: “There is much still to be said about that... this notion of a man lashing himself in cold blood is a very serious matter.”

Now we read a brief episode in the novel’s fourth inn. The narrator hints that DQ’s madness is abating: “I say that it was an inn because Don Quijote called it as much, straying from the habit that he had of calling all inns castles.” SP is happy that DQ acts rational for once. Presumably, their stay will go smoothly. Indeed, when SP asks the innkeeper about dinner, his response bodes well: “the host responded that his mouth would be satisfied.” This reminds informed readers of Lazarillo’s achievement of prosperity in the sixth chapter of El Lazarillo de Tormes. After a comic interlude, in which the innkeeper denies every dish that SP requests, the host finally offers him “two cow’s feet.” Again, this is what Lazarillo and the hidalgo eat in the first picaresque novel. Notice also how SP eagerly pays for this meal: “I claim them as mine from here... and nobody touch them, for I’ll pay more for them than anybody else.” Commerce is hope.

Cha

pte

r 59



When DQ sits down to eat in a very deliberate fashion, Cervantes throws us into another of those meta-literary mise-en-abyme moments that anticipate a favorite trope of modernist literature. DQ overhears two men discussing “the second part of Don Quijote of La Mancha” and he is shocked: “As soon as Don Quijote heard his name, he stood up and listened intently to what they were saying about him.” DQ is further startled when these two nobles, Don Juan and Don Jerónimo, mention that the author of this book “paints Don Quijote as no longer in love with Dulcinea of Toboso.” Infuriated, DQ shouts through the walls that DQ could never forget Dulcinea and he challenges anyone who claims that he could. The others shout back: “Who is answering us?” Now SP responds that it’s DQ himself. Note how, during this exchange between two separate rooms in the inn, the verb “to respond” occurs three times in ten words.

The novel the two gentlemen are reading is Avellaneda’s apocryphal continuation of 1614, which makes this an amazing moment in DQ as well as the entire history of the novel form. One of the two men actually places the book in DQ’s hands. We have read about characters who have read part one, but this is the first time that characters have read the other part two. They now discuss and debate the contents of Avellaneda’s book. It’s all lighthearted: Cervantes clearly delights in the opportunity to create even more mindboggling problems. For example, DQ notes that the language of part two sounds too Aragonese and that the author confuses a major aspect of the story when he calls SP’s wife Mari Gutiérrez. But what DQ claims to be examples of Aragonese diction are in fact not so, and Cervantes himself already mixed up Teresa’s name in DQ 1.7, not only calling her Mari Gutiérrez but also Juana Panza. As another example, the men claim Avellaneda calls SP a drunkard, but in this episode Cervantes has SP drink the innkeeper under the table and remain unfazed, like a new version of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium.

Nevertheless, Cervantes now makes a clear distinction between his narrative and Avellaneda’s by having DQ renounce his journey to Zaragoza: “I will not set foot in Zaragoza, and thus I will leave the lie of this modern historian where the whole world can see it, and people will realize that I am not the Don Quijote that he says I am.” It’s weird: without Avellaneda Cervantes might not have finished his novel, and he certainly could not have produced this wildly creative exchange. Thus, we sense respect, even gratitude. There seems something deeper at work, something anti-imperial in this chapter. One of the gentlemen observes that DQ is to Alexander the Great as the writer Cide Hamete is to the painter Apelles, i.e., a loyal critic. Also, by not going to Zaragoza, DQ seems to reject Castile’s conquest of Aragón in 1591. Consider, too, the highly charged Latin phrase that the narrator uses to describe SP sitting down to his meal con mero mixto imperio, a legalistic phrase meaning “with full political and juridical powers.” Finally, note the ultimate turn to commerce, suggesting a new Alexander: “Sancho paid the innkeeper magnificently.”



Roque Guinart

C hapter sixty relates the amazing encounter with Roque Guinart, a bandolero of Cataluña based on a real historical figure. The episode is a political allegory about justice, offering a contrast between high imperialism and its lower alternatives. As we shall see, the latter include anarchy, crime syndicates, and republicanism in its crudest form—i.e., factions. DQ begins

by making sure not to go anywhere near Zaragoza: “finding out first which was the most direct road to Barcelona without going near Zaragoza.” Recall that Zaragoza is named after Augustus Caesar. Six days later, our heroes spend the night among “oak or cork trees,” an odd vacillation between sublime and base trees, which the narrator ominously attributes to Cide Hamete’s uncertainty. DQ meditates on the three appearances of Dulcinea in part two: in the Cave of Montesinos, outside El Toboso, and at the Duke and Duchess’s estate in the company of Merlin. Finally, DQ decides to assault his squire one last time. Note the imperial anecdote that he cites, which includes the origin of the motto of the Catholic Kings of Spain: “If Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot, saying ‘It’s all the same whether to cut or untie,’ and for that he did not cease to be the universal lord of all Asia, then the exact same thing could happen now in the disenchantment of Dulcinea should I lash Sancho against his will.” Politically speaking, DQ appeals to empire to justify his abuse of the domestic population.

When DQ unties SP’s belt, the squire awakes and rebels. First, he objects on legal grounds: “The lashes to which I obliged myself have to be voluntary, and not by force.” Then he reacts physically: “giving him a kick, he threw him to the ground face up.” Recall the description of SP as having “long shanks” in DQ 1.9. SP presses his knee into DQ’s chest and pins his arms to the ground. It’s a major turning point: SP breaks the organic bonds of feudalism. DQ is shocked for the second time in two chapters: “How now traitor? You dare to raise your hand against your natural lord and master?” SP justifies his actions using complex and ironical allusions to the first civil war of Castile between Pedro I (allied with the townships and the Jews) and Enrique II (supported by the nobles). Curiously, he

Cha

pte

r 60

LESS

ON

21



quotes the supporters of Enrique II: “I remove no king, I install no king... rather, I’m helping myself, for I’m my own lord.” Stranger still, he then identifies with a female character in a popular ballad: “here you will die, traitor, / enemy of Doña Sancha.” DQ relents and promises not to touch SP again. Like the fulling-mills episode, there’s something homoerotic here. More importantly, the stage is set for the political problem of Roque’s bandits.

The encounter with Roque begins when SP hits his head on the feet of bodies hanging from nearby trees. DQ explains that men have been hanged according to the brutal justice of bandits, and so they must be near Barcelona, famous at that time for its factionalism. Suddenly, our heroes are surrounded by more than forty of Roque’s bandits, all speaking Catalan. They are particularly interested in the belt and saddlebags of SP’s ass. SP worries about the gold escudos given to him by the Duke. Fortunately for SP, Roque arrives. He’s about thirty-four years old, of dark complexion, and carries “four pocket pistols” or “short blunderbusses,” a small shotgun popularized by Catalan bandits. The specificity of guns is thematic in this episode. There’s also a double social conflict here. Roque euphemistically tells his “squires” to leave SP alone, and he tells DQ, who is melancholic and defeated, not to worry, claiming that he is not cruel like Osiris. This is a contradiction because Roque alludes to the cruel Egyptian king Busiris. Either way, DQ represents a Castilian Hercules, who avenged the death of Osiris, but killed Busiris. Roque again consoles DQ: “the Heavens, by strange and unseen ways never imagined by mankind, frequently elevate the fallen and enrich the poor.” Note the role reversal, with the bandit playing the role of the Virgilian or Christian liberator and DQ that of the captive.

“Here you will die, traitor, / enemy of

Doña Sancha.”



Claudia JerónimaN ow we have another case of narrative interpolation. A young man arrives on horseback, dressed in green, with golden

spurs, dagger, and sword, and also a shotgun and two pistols. This figure turns out to be (but of course!) a woman, Claudia Jerónima. As elsewhere in our novel, Claudia Jerónima tells her story, which is both romantic and political. There’s an

amazingly modern feminist discourse here based on the equalizing power of guns. Note how, since SP has just identified with a woman in his political struggle with DQ, guns also give power to commoners in their struggles against the nobility (cf. DQ’s fear of bullets in DQ 2.27). Claudia Jerónima reports that she has shot her future husband, Vicente Torrellas, in a fit of jealous rage after she discovered that he had promised to marry another woman. Her description is graphic, but it also refers metaphorically to her honor and alludes to the conflict between servants and masters: “I shot him with this shotgun, and on top of that with these two pistols, and so I think I must have lodged more than two bullets in his body, opening doors in him through which my honor could escape bathed in his blood. I left him there among his servants, who neither dared nor could have come to his defense.”

The politics of this are explicit: Claudia Jerónima seeks Roque’s protection from revenge by the Torrellas clan because her father is Roque’s ally who represents the Nyerros faction (known as the lechoncillos or “piglets”); whereas the Torrellas pertain to the Cadells faction (known as the cachorros or “pups”). We have, therefore, an allegory about the tribal instability of Catalan republicanism. Cervantes’s view of the factions of Barcelona echoes Dante’s view of the strife between the Guelphs and Ghibellines of medieval Florence. Cervantes’s narrative alludes to events in Cataluña around 1600. Claudia Jerónima’s “short blunderbusses,” for example, were prohibited by laws like those instituted by SP at the end of his reign at Barataria. These laws were hotly debated. The Habsburgs supported them, but certain groups of nobles in Barcelona argued that the laws had not been properly approved by the Corts, the Barcelonan parliament. In fact, the actual printing of these laws was delayed for over a year and half after the 1599 Corts approved them. Remember this intense relation between politics and printing.

LESS

ON

22

65

Like the novel’s other love stories, Claudia Jerónima’s tale is also a typical Renaissance tragedy involving caballeros and doncellas. DQ and SP make this connection when the knight offers to intervene and the squire recalls his master’s success at arranging the marriage of Doña Rodríguez’s deflowered daughter. Question: Is Claudia Jerónima a virgin? After ordering his squires to return everything they took from SP’s ass, Roque accompanies Claudia Jerónima in search of Don Vicente. They find the nobleman in the throes of death. He tells Claudia Jerónima that she was mistaken, that he was not going to marry the other woman. As proof, he asks her to take his hand in marriage and then passes out. Note how the earlier story of Basilio and Quiteria, complete with two opposing clans, has prepared readers to expect a happy miracle. But it’s not to be. Vicente dies and Claudia Jerónima laments the horrific power of her jealousy: “Oh rabid power of jealousy!” A mysterious narrative voice now ties this tragic love story back to the political role played by Roque: “Such and so sad were the lamentations of Claudia that they drew forth tears from the eyes of Roque, which did not normally shed them on any occasion.” What is the relation between jealousy and factionalism, between sexual rivalry and political rivalry?

Now we transition back to the issue of justice. Roque returns to find DQ trying to convince his men to be civilized and give up banditry. It’s an hilarious scene because nobody understands him and Roque ignores him. But it’s also symbolic of the limits of the law. Note how the political scene takes an economic turn. Roque asks SP if his men have returned everything they took from his ass. SP responds that they still have “three nightcaps that were worth three cities.” This is hilarious because it reminds us that SP stole three nightcaps from Altisidora in DQ 2.58. It also recalls the School of Salamanca’s view of the subjective nature of value, because one of Roque’s “squires” challenges SP’s estimate: “What are you talking about, man?... I have them and they’re not worth three reales.” DQ articulates the theory: “So it is... but my squire esteems them in the way he has said on account of their having been given to me by the person who gave them to me.” The problem, of course, is not just value but the means of possession, for DQ conveniently omits that SP stole the nightcaps.

Cervantes extends his political and economic reflections on justice when Roque orders his men to produce all their stolen booty, which he then redistributes among them. Problem: because the goods are stolen, Roque’s distributive justice, which addresses an individual’s obligations to the community, violates commutative justice, which addresses the obligations of individuals to other individuals. Also at issue is a third form of classical justice, legal justice, which addresses the community’s obligations to individuals. This is because Roque’s bandits operate beyond the reach of the Spanish State. Complicating matters further, Roque makes proper use of money as a universal store of value which facilitates his division of the booty: “gathering together that which was not divisible and converting it into money, he divided it among the company, and with such legality and prudence that he did not exceed nor withhold distributive justice in any way.” Finally, SP ironically cites Cicero’s notion of “justice among thieves”: “justice is such an important good that it’s necessary to use it even among thieves.” But wait: SP is also a thief.



Roque’sdistributive justiceR oque’s example of justice among thieves widens its scope when a coach and a group of travelers appear. They are headed

for Barcelona and Roque orders his men to hijack them. While this blatant highway robbery takes place in the background, DQ and Roque have an intense conversation. Roque confesses that he is morally misguided. He has chosen the life of a

bandit because of a strange desire for revenge: “wanting to avenge myself of a certain grievance that was done to me, all my good inclinations come crashing to the ground and I persevere in this state over and against all that I know.” Recalling the parade of saints in DQ 2.58, Roque here alludes to Paul: “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing” (Romans 7.19). On one hand, like Dante’s Inferno, there are no gates keeping Roque in hell; it is his personal decision to remain there. On the other hand, there’s something universal about how our collective desires for revenge lead to anarchy: “just as one abyss calls forth another and one sin leads to the next, vengeances have been strung together in such a way that I now assume the weight not only of my own but of others.” The result echoes the encounter between Cardenio and DQ in the Sierra Morena. Another labyrinth needs a guiding light: “even though I find myself out in the middle of the labyrinth of my own confusions, I am not without hope of escaping and getting to a safe harbor.” DQ’s response combines the Christian idea of salvation through penitence with the Platonic metaphor of political advice as medicine: “Your grace is ill, you know your sickness, and Heaven, or I should say God, who is our physician, will apply medicines to you that will cure you, medicines that tend to cure little by little, not suddenly or by way of a miracle.” Note DQ’s modern swerve away from miracles. Nevertheless, he tells Roque to join him and suffer the life of a knight errant because that way he can go straight to heaven.

Cha

pte

r 61

LESS

ON

23



Roque changes topics by telling DQ the story of Claudia Jerónima, to whom SP was particularly attracted. SP’s bias is perhaps sexual, perhaps political: “the beauty, confidence, and spirit of the girl had not seemed bad to him.” At this point the bandits arrive with their captives and everyone stands before Roque, “the vanquished and the victors.” The scene recalls DQ’s encounter with the Basque woman headed for Seville in DQ 1.8. But it’s more complex due to the presence of Roque, the diverse statuses and destinations of the travelers, and the intense monetary calculation that takes place regarding the booty. The hijacked party consists of two infantry captains on horseback accompanied by two mule boys; then two pilgrims on foot; and finally a coach containing the wife of the regional governor of Naples, her daughter, a maid, a lady-in-waiting, and six servants. We learn their respective destinations and amounts of money. The companies of the soldiers are in Naples but they are headed to Sicily with 200 or 300 escudos. The pilgrims are headed to Rome with 60 reales. The women are headed to Naples with 600 escudos.

What follows is one morally messy scene. Cervantes represents most of humanity here as thieves and he unveils justice as a combination of hypocritical magnanimity and arbitrary brutality. Roque calculates the total booty at 900 escudos and 60 reales. Oddly, he asks others to calculate the division “because I am bad at counting.” Since he has sixty men, this makes for 15 escudos and 1 real each. The men cheer him and call his enemies thieves. But when the hijacked party laments “the confiscation of their wealth,” Roque reigns in his thievery, making it something more like extortion. Euphemistically, he asks the soldiers and the magistrate’s wife to “loan” him 60 and 80 escudos, promising them safe conduct to Barcelona, and he refuses to take anything from the pilgrims. Those being robbed now view Roque as a model of “courtesy and liberalness,” a kind of noble: “considering him more an Alexander the Great than a well-known criminal.” His division of the booty is weirder. Of the 140 escudos, he gives two to each of his men. Then he gives ten to the pilgrims and the final ten to none other than SP, so that he will speak well of him! For all you anarchists out there, this sure does read like a mockery of the State as nothing but a bunch of robbers who pay moralists and commoners to support their cause. Although it seems random that SP should benefit here, perhaps this says something about the true nature of governors.

To top this all off, when one of his “squires” makes a sarcastic comment that cuts to the issue of just whose property it is that Roque gives away –“This captain of ours would make a better friar than bandit: from now on, if he wishes to show himself liberal, let him do so with his own wealth and not ours”–, the bandit leader draws his sword and in the blink of an eye “he almost split his head open in two parts.” After this, Cervantes puns on this idea of “parts”: “Roque separated himself and stood apart from the others and wrote a letter to a friend of his in Barcelona.” Stranger still, the bandit writes to his friend that he will put DQ on display on the beach in Barcelona as if he were merchandise for sale. He says his friend should notify the other Nyerros, and he laments the fact that their enemies, the Cadells, will also delight in DQ and SP’s presence. It’s as if our heroes were now a public good: “they could not help but give general pleasure to everyone.” Finally, a bandit, who seamlessly transforms himself into a peasant, escorts our heroes to Barcelona.

In chapter sixty-one DQ and SP arrive in Barcelona. After three days in the company of Roque, whose life consists of constant movement and paranoia, our heroes see the ocean for the first time in their lives. Barcelona is preparing for the Feast Day of Saint John



“he almost split his head open in two parts.”

the Baptist. The nobility and the military greet DQ with trumpets and banners, and canons fire salvos from the fortresses as well as the galleys. Roque’s friend now arrives with other horsemen dressed in full regalia and they all circle about DQ. This symbolic gesture accompanies a loud welcome that distinguishes the hero and his original Moorish author from the apocryphal ones: “let the valiant Don Quijote of La Mancha be welcomed: not the false one, not the fictional one, not the apocryphal one who has been shown to us recently in fake histories but, rather, the true one, the legal one, the faithful one described for us by Cide Hamete, that flower of all historians.” Finally, some mischievous boys tie spiny shrubs to the tails of Rocinante and SP’s ass, causing them to buck and throw our heroes to the ground. A triumphant entrance into Barcelona ends in comic shame.






Chapter fifty-nine exhibits Cervantes’s most famous meta-textual moment. Even stranger than the search for the lost manuscript in DQ 1.9 or the idea that Carrasco or the Duke and Duchess have read part one, DQ meets men who are reading yet another version of his novel. Cervantes may be annoyed, but he owes Avellaneda a debt of gratitude. If not for Avellaneda, would Cervantes have conceived of this hyper-self-reflection, which makes DQ such a unique and monumental text? Think about it. Cervantes has a fictional character, DQ, renounce his intention to visit Zaragoza as a means of proving that, in reality, he is not the same as another fictional DQ. As another sign that things are falling apart, chapter sixty offers a mindboggling political allegory. If Barataria was complicated, what are we to make of the noble, yet vicious, bandit Roque Guinart? Is he an image of what happens when there’s no rule of law? Or is he a subtle metaphor for what the rule of law actually is? It’s an amazing prelude to Barcelona and Cervantes was clearly fascinated by the factional, anarchical violence of Catalonian politics around 1600. There’s also something symbolic about the traveling party robbed by Roque. Headed to Rome, Sicily, and Naples, i.e., the eastern frontier of the Spanish Empire, they represent a religious, military, and political power structure. More amazing, within this political maze, Cervantes lodges the tight tragedy of Claudia Jerónima and Don Vicente Torrellas. Perhaps Cervantes complicates his own feminism here. Does Claudia Jerónima avenge the novel’s other mistreated women, Marcela, Dorotea, or Camila? Or does she represent the fact that women are just as capable of irrational brutality as men? Guns equalize us, but they don’t necessarily make us better human beings. Finally, these textual, political, and sexual confusions were all previewed by SP’s violent reaction to his master’s attempt to whip him against his will. It’s a major turning point in the relationship between hidalgo and squire. SP tosses aside the organic obligations of feudalism and claims his natural right to defend himself. DQ is shocked and melancholic. Welcome to the modern, fallen world of DQ 2. Roque’s paranoid lifestyle, the Duke and Duchess’s pettiness, and our hidalgo’s helplessness signal that nobility no longer connotes honor and power. And cosmopolitan Barcelona, the only urban setting in the novel, is symbolic of the dissolution of the chivalric ideal. Even the date, six months before Christmas, suggests that Cervantes has brought us to the polar opposite of DQ’s idealistic fantasy.

Let’s review

“Don Quixote is not ‘about’ the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique.”

— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory



“This isDon Quijoteof La Mancha.”I n chapter sixty-two of DQ 2, we learn that DQ’s host in Barcelona is named Don Antonio Moreno. He’s another rich noble with a

tendency toward pranks. He displays DQ on the balcony of his house and the people of Barcelona are amused: “they stared at him like a she-monkey.” For his part, Sancho anticipates the good life “because it seemed to him that he had found himself,

without knowing how nor why, another Camacho’s wedding, another household like Don Diego de Miranda’s, and another castle like the Duke’s.”

At dinner the topic is SP. Don Antonio notes that everyone has read that SP is a glutton: “In these parts we have news, good Sancho, that you are such a fan of rice-milk morsels and croquettes that if there are extras, you hide them in your shirt for another day.” This refers to a scene at the house of Don Álvaro Tarfe in the other DQ. Once again, Cervantes exploits the contrast between his novel and the apocryphal one. SP maintains that he is not a glutton and that he has good table manners. Hinting at his obsession with beards, he says that he would even curse the other novel, “if I did not see all these honorable beards that are at the table.” DQ attributes SP’s good manners to the fact that he has governed an island: “during the time that he was governor he learned to eat properly, so much so that he used a fork to eat grapes and even pomegranate seeds.” When Don Antonio expresses disbelief, SP reviews his decision to retire from governance: “I lost my peace of mind and I learned to despise all the world’s governments.” He even relates how he fell into a cave and only escaped thanks to a miracle. In other words, all this parodies Plato’s Republic.

This political topic gives way to Don Antonio’s display of a magical machine that he has purchased. It’s a preview of the “enchanted head” that will converse with our heroes later in the chapter. Notice three aspects of this bronze bust. First, the narrator describes it in political terms, as it sits atop a table “in the manner of the busts of Roman emperors.” Second, it represents a mixture of technology

Cha

pte

r 62

LESS

ON

24



and magic. Readers would have recognized the talking head as a mechanical marvel, like those produced by Juanelo Turriano toward the end of the sixteenth century. Yet Don Antonio says it has magical powers: “it was made and fashioned by one of the greatest enchanters and wizards the world has ever seen,” and furthermore “it has the power and virtue of responding to all things that are asked of it.” Third, we learn that Don Antonio paid 1,000 escudos for it. Don Quijote is amazed, mostly about its magical powers: “Don Quijote remained astonished by the virtues and properties of the head.” Curiously, the machine is silent on Fridays, so they have to wait another day to see it in action.

Now, leading up to the ultimate encounter with the “enchanted head,” we get two episodes in which DQ is severely mocked. First, Don Antonio parades DQ through Barcelona on a mule in his street clothes with a sign posted on his back that reads “This is Don Quijote of La Mancha.” This is cruel because DQ thinks people recognize him because he is famous. But note how the scene also reads like Cervantes responding to Avellaneda again. A Castilian man in the crowd shouts at DQ in a way that alludes to the overall meaning of Cervantes’s most famous character. He says DQ is not just crazy himself but makes others seem crazy: “you have the power to turn all those who deal and communicate with you into fools and idiots.” He then echoes many characters who have argued that DQ should return home and attend to his own affairs: “Go home, idiot, and look after your household.” Don Antonio defends DQ, calling him “sane,” and points out the man’s hypocrisy: “go your evil way and don’t meddle where you are not asked.” Is this the purpose of Cervantes’s satire, i.e., to use DQ as a means of revealing the illogical flaws of others in Spanish society? The man in the crowd seems to acknowledge that DQ is a kind of Christ-like figure who reveals the shame of others: “may the evil luck that your grace mentioned reach me and all my descendants.”

“they stared at him like a she-monkey.”

“Don Quixote is not ‘about’ the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique.”

— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory



LESS

ON

25

Don Quijote and the enchanted head

T he second mockery of our hero occurs that evening at a dance held by the women of Don Antonio’s household. Two of these women are picaresque characters –“picaresque in their preferences and prankish”–, who force DQ to dance until he is dizzy: “they were in such urgency to get Don Quijote to dance with them that they thrashed him, not only his body but

his soul.” So our hero is milled yet again, left sitting in the middle of the dance floor “thrashed and broken from so much dancing.” And he shouts a Latin phrase that alludes to the Church’s practice of exorcisms: Fugite, partes adversae, which means “Demons be gone!” There’s something sacrificial about DQ’s experiences in Barcelona.

The next day Don Antonio and his wife, DQ and SP, and two other couples visit the “enchanted head.” Note that the two additional women are the same ones that thrashed DQ on the dance floor the previous evening. Also note that Don Antonio only informs his two male friends regarding the secret that the head is connected by a tube to the room below, which allows one of his nephews to produce answers to everyone’s questions. The head recognizes how many are present, which causes general amazement: “At this there was again much astonishment! At this sheer terror made everyone’s hair stand on end!” It proceeds to respond with enigmatic wisdom to a series of questions. Mostly its answers are “perogrulladas,” or clichés, but occasionally they are remarkably specific. It tells one woman that the way to be beautiful is to be chaste. It tells another that if she wants to know if her husband loves her, she should consider his actions. It provides the full name of Don Antonio’s friend “Don Pedro Noriz.” It tells the other man that his first-born son wishes him dead so he can inherit his fortune. It tells Don Antonio’s wife that she will enjoy many years with her husband because “his health and his temperance in living promise many years of life.”

Cha

pte

r 62



When it’s his turn, DQ asks three things, which reveal his primary concern in life: 1) Was what he saw in the Cave of Montesinos true or a dream?; 2) Will SP fulfill his promise to give himself lashes?; 3) Will this bring about the disenchantment of Dulcinea? Regarding the Cave of Montesinos, the head remains unclear: “there is much to be said: it has a little of everything.” Regarding SP’s lashes, it says “they will go slowly,” but that “the disenchantment of Dulcinea will be properly executed.” DQ is most satisfied. SP also asks three questions that reveal his very different set of concerns: 1) Will he govern again?; 2) Will he escape “the poverty of being a squire”; 3) Will he see his wife and children again? The head’s answers are less satisfactory, although they are technically correct: SP will govern his household; because he will return home he will see his wife and children; and because he will cease serving his master, he will escape being a squire. SP is unimpressed.

The narrator then explains to us in elaborate detail exactly how the “enchanted head” works. It’s a very technical case of disenchantment, one of those moments in DQ when reality trumps fantasy by way of something bordering on a scientific explanation. At the very least, it reads like the ending of a detective novel in which the elaborate efforts of the criminal are revealed in full. Notice that the narrator explains that Cide Hamete was particularly keen on revealing “the case”: “Which Cide Hamete Benengeli quickly wanted to clarify so as not to keep the world in suspense believing that some magical and extraordinary mystery was involved in the aforementioned head.” Most amazing here is the fact that, immediately after the technical explanation, Cide Hamete goes on to explain that Don Antonio’s “enchanted head” brought him into conflict with the Inquisition: “And Cide Hamete says more: this marvelous machine lasted up to ten or twelve days, but after news spread throughout the city that Don Antonio had in his house an enchanted head which responded to all those who questioned it, fearing this would reach the ears of the vigilant sentinels of our Faith, and having declared the case to our lord inquisitors, these ordered him to disassemble it and to cease and desist, lest the ignorant commoner not be scandalized.” Wow! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! This is an amazing passage that reveals the general power of religious authority in Spain at that time, as well as the paranoid, vindictive, and destructive nature of many of the individuals living under its surveillance.



LESS

ON

26

The printing house and “the men of the Inquisition”N ow we turn, significantly, to DQ’s encounter with a printing press, a printer, and a series of books, among them the apocryphal

continuation by Avellaneda. DQ tours Barcelona on foot and sees the chapter’s second sign: “Books Are Printed Here.” He witnesses every aspect of a printing shop: “he saw them drawing sheets in one area, correcting in another, setting type

here, amending there, and, finally, all the work that can be seen in the great print shops.” It’s an amazingly reflexive moment. This would be something like Matt Drudge or Barbara Oakley touring a factory that makes servers. Interestingly, DQ gets into a long conversation with a man who is printing a work that he has translated from Italian (Tuscan) into Spanish (Castilian). The narrator refers to this man as “the author” throughout this conversation and the book is mysteriously entitled, “Le bagatele” in Italian, which means “The Toys.” No one has ever figured out if this book really existed or not. Wild theories abound, such as the idea that Le bagatele is an anagram for Le Galatee, which was translated into Spanish in 1585 by a man who was a prisoner with Cervantes in Algiers. Recall that Cervantes’s own La Galatea, also published in 1585, was spared the flames in the mockery of the Inquisitional auto de fe of DQ 1.6. Given the self-reflexive and mechanical aspects of this entire chapter, however, it would not be difficult to imagine The Toys as a reference to the novel we are currently reading.

There are essentially three phases to DQ’s visit to the printer’s shop. All three are uncannily related to Cervantes himself. First, DQ mocks the author’s superficial knowledge of Italian. He knows simple words like “toys,” “stew pot,” “to please,” “more,” “above,” and “below.” It’s an odd sequence, no? At the same time, DQ lets us know that he has memorized some verses of Ariosto, and then he gives us a beautiful disquisition on the art of translation: “it seems to me that translating from one language to another, as long as it’s not from Greek or Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from behind, because even though the figures can be seen, they are covered by threads that blur them and they can’t be viewed with the smoothness and coloring of the right side.” We know from part one that Cervantes had high regard for Ariosto and that several characters associated with Italy are autobiographical in nature. DQ also notes that the best translators, among them Juan de Jáuregui, “easily make you doubt which is the translation and which the original.” According to Cervantes’s prologue to his Exemplary Novels (1613), this same Jáuregui painted his portrait.



In the second phase of the printing shop episode, DQ asks about the author’s business model. The man says he plans to earn 1,000 ducados by selling 2,000 copies of his book at six reales each. At eleven reales per ducado, this means that the author plans to make 11,000 reales on sales of 12,000 reales. DQ quickly realizes that the man is deluded if he thinks that his production costs and commissions will only amount to 1,000 reales. In a chapter that is all about mocking DQ, it is interesting that here, at least, DQ mocks the author: “Your grace sure can count!” Curiously, the author says he is interested in profit: “I want gain, without which a good reputation isn’t worth a farthing.” DQ responds again with heavy sarcasm: “God grant your grace good fortune.” Is Cervantes giving us access to his motives for publishing DQ? By the way, for a man who could not manage his own household, and had to be told to take money with him on his adventures, DQ sure is quick with his math here.

The third phase of the printing shop episode involves two books that DQ notices. The first is Luz del alma, or Light of the Soul, which DQ praises: “These are the kinds of books that ought to be printed, even though there are many of this genre, because there are many sinners and infinite lights are needed for so many unilluminated.” Apparently, the book alludes to a catechism by Felipe de Meneses. Given DQ’s preference for books of chivalry, his praise for a religious instruction manual is very strange. As Francisco Rico notes, however, Meneses’s book was heavily influenced by Erasmus and even more so by the Archbishop Bartolomé de Carranza, who spent eighteen years defending himself against charges of heresy. Once again, Cervantes seems to be mocking the Inquisition and declaring himself a fan of Erasmian humanism. The second book is none other than Avellaneda’s continuation, “Second Part of the Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quijote of La Mancha.” With hilarious irony, DQ says he thought the book “had already been burned and turned to ashes for being so impertinent.” He then notes that its day of reckoning will come, “its Saint Martin’s Day will come like it does for every pig,” adding that creative fiction ought to be more verisimilar before wandering off. Ironic, no?

“toys,” “stew pot,” “to please,” “more,”

“above,” and “below.”



LESS

ON

27

More galley slavesC hapter sixty-three moves away from the meta-literary games of the previous chapter and gets back down to Cervantes’s very

serious business of using literature to criticize the anti-Morisco policy. This happens in both of the chapter’s parts, which are announced in the subtitle as “the visit to the galleys” and “the strange new adventure of the beautiful Morisca.” As

a preamble to the visit to the galleys, the narrator reminds us that DQ is still obsessed with the disenchantment of Dulcinea, whereas SP continues to hope that he will once again rule over others. There is a narrative and comedic point to this, because it sets us up for one of the chapter’s jokes. But on a thematic level it also reminds us of DQ’s trans-ethnic love affair with Dulcinea as well as SP’s slaver fantasy and his recent support for the policy of expulsion.

The main galley welcomes our hidalgo with honor. A skiff decked out in red velvet shuttles them from the shore, canons are fired, the crew shouts “¡Hu, hu, hu!” when DQ comes aboard, and the general, “who was a distinguished Valencian noble,” expresses satisfaction at the visit by our exemplary knight-errant: “I shall mark this day with a white stone!” Note the key difference between the experiences and the reactions of DQ and SP. DQ is most impressed at being treated like a dignitary. By contrast, SP experiences a hellish scene. He focuses on the galley slaves: “Sancho was astonished to see so many half-naked men, and even more so when he saw them set the awning with such speed that it seemed to him that all Hell’s devils were working at it.” What happens next is supremely symbolic, recalling for us the issue of slavery: “starting with the line of men on the right, they passed him and tossed him from bench to bench above the arms of the rowers, and with such speed that poor Sancho blacked out and doubtless thought that the demons had come for him... The poor man ended up thrashed, gasping for air, and covered in sweat, unable to figure out what had happened to him.” Of course, we recognize what has happened as a parody of what the galley slaves of La Presa, or The Prize, did to their evil captain when they were overtaken by La Loba, or The Wolf, in DQ 1.39. It’s another case of poetic justice for our slaver governor.

Cha

pte

r 63



Next, Cervantes drives home the moral point of the episode for those who do not catch the parallels with The Captive’s Tale. The galley comes about and pursues an Algerian corsair that has been spotted in the distance. The narrator gives us access to SP’s inner thoughts, which ironically connect the enchantment theme to those of slavery and religious orthodoxy: “Surely these are truly enchanted things, not like those my master talks about. What have these unfortunate men done to deserve such a whipping, and how can this one man walking along here whistling be so bold as to flog so many people? I’d say this is Hell, or at least Purgatory.”

DQ’s hilarious reaction indicates his monomania regarding SP’s lashes: “Ah, Sancho my friend, with what brevity and what little cost, if you wished, could you strip down to your waist and subject yourself to these men and complete the disenchantment of Dulcinea!” Funny yes, but this also implicates our hidalgo as a man who would enslave SP.

What happens next reveals a Christian moral emerging from the horrific chaos of war. The galley overtakes a smaller sailing vessel, a brigantine, and at the first pass, the Algerian arráez, or “captain,” tries to surrender, but two Turks fire their weapons and kill two Spaniards. The general of the galley now plans to avenge the deaths of his soldiers by hanging the Turks as well as the Algerian captain from the galley’s lateen yard. He plans this hanging while anchored back at the beach, which allows the Viceroy of Barcelona and a few guests to come aboard. So we have seamlessly entered another Moorish romance, similar to The Captive’s Tale in that one of the Algerian sailors is a “renegade,” or Christian converted to Islam, who speaks Spanish. The new narrative has a Byzantine touch, however, in that there is serious gender confusion. This reminds us of the first appearance of Claudia Jerónima or the curious damsel that SP encountered during his nocturnal rounds at Barataria. The Algerian captain turned captive reveals himself as “one of the most beautiful and gallant young boys that the human imagination could ever portray.” The Viceroy is particularly impressed by the captain’s beauty and wants to pardon him. When he enquires about his origins, the Algerian captain responds with shocking news: “a Christian woman.”

“Ah, Sancho my friend, with what brevity and what little cost, if you wished, could you strip down to your waist and subject yourself to these men and complete the

disenchantment of Dulcinea!”



Ana FélixI n typical Cervantine fashion, the rest of chapter sixty-three consists of the interpolated story told by this young woman disguised

as an Algerian pirate. The classical source of this type of narrative is Heliodorus’s epic Aethiopica which was written in the third or fourth century AD and rediscovered at Budapest in 1526. If Apuleius’s The Golden Ass is the principal model for Don Quijote,

towards the end of his life, Cervantes was also using the Aethiopica as a model, as can be seen most clearly in his last work, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617.

The first thing we notice about the Christian woman’s story is that she explicitly states that her intention is to forestall her hanging. In this sense, she is also very much like Queen Scheherazade in the Arabic Thousand and One Nights: “My lords!... delay the enactment of my death, for little will be lost by suspending your vengeance long enough for me to tell you the story of my life.” Our principal narrator intervenes to emphasize this point –“Who had such a heart of stone that it would not soften before these pronouncements?”–, curiously maintaining the masculine identity of the storyteller as “young man” and “boy.”

With her hands tied, the girl identifies herself as a Morisca and underscores the fact that she is not one of those who fake their Christianity, “but one who is true and Catholic.” Again: “I drank the Catholic faith in my mother’s milk.” Like so many Moriscos, she has been exiled to North Africa, or the “Barbary Coast.” Before the expulsion, she had fallen in love with “a young nobleman named Don Gaspar Gregorio, the eldest son of a gentleman who had a village next to ours.” This recalls Doña Clara and Don Luis. Following the girl, Don Gregorio disguised himself and traveled to Algiers among the exiled Moriscos, “because he knew the language very well.” The girl was called before the Turkish governor of Algiers and told him that she knew of the location of her father’s treasure and that she could retrieve it for him. News arrives at the Algierian court of a beautiful young man, and the girl immediately recognizes that it must be Gregorio. Here we have another allusion to the Turks’ reputation for homosexuality: “I was worried, considering the danger that Gregorio faced, because among those barbarous Turks a handsome boy or young man is held in higher esteem than a woman, no matter how stunning she may be.”

LESS

ON

28



One gender confusion leads to another, as the girl informs the Algerian governor that Gregorio is actually a girl: “I let him know that he was not a man but a woman like me, and I implored him to let me dress her in her traditional clothes.” She then convinced the Algerian governor to place Gregorio, dressed as a Mooress, in the company of “several Mooress princesses who would protect her and serve her.” Meanwhile she was to recover her father’s treasure by returning to Spain in the brigantine, accompanied by the two Turks who had shot the Christian soldiers. This is where things stand: “And so, Don Gregorio remains dressed like a woman among women, in manifest danger of being lost, and I find myself with my hands tied, expecting or, I should say fearing, to the point of exhaustion that I am to lose my own.”

Now we have a classic case of “anagnorisis,” or recognition, as an old pilgrim, who had boarded the galley in the company of the Viceroy, steps forward and reveals that he is the girl’s father: “Oh Ana Félix, ill-fated child of mine! I’m your father, Ricote, who came back to look for you because I cannot live without you, for you are my soul.” Interestingly, the narrator focuses on SP’s reaction. Notice how he awakens from a state of self-pity and takes deep interest in his former neighbor: “Sancho opened his eyes and raised his head (which he had inclined, meditating on the disgrace of his tossing) and, looking at the pilgrim, he recognized the same Ricote that he had met the day he left his governorship.” Ricote then tells of his exile and his trip to Germany in search of freedom, and concludes with a general plea that recalls for us the theme of justice: “If our minimal blame, along with her tears and mine, and according to the integrity of your justice system, can make way for mercy, then please have mercy, for we have never thought to go against any of you.” Here Cervantes seems to appeal for a flexible policy of readmission for at least some of the exiled Moriscos. On one hand, SP’s experience of mistreatment at the hands of the galley slaves is a form of poetic justice with a Christian moral against slavery and the expulsion. On the other hand, notice that our squire remains complicit in Philip III’s policy: “I know Ricote well and I know that it is true what he says about Ana Félix being his daughter; although I’m not getting involved with that other stuff about his comings and goings or whether or not he has good intentions.”

Two points about the conclusion of this reunion between Ricote and Ana Félix. First, the general of the galley still wants to hang the two Turks, but continuing the theme of mercy, the Viceroy convinces him not to. Second, the “Spanish renegade” in the company of Ana Félix offers to return to Algiers to rescue Gregorio. Ricote reveals his liberal nature by producing 2,000 ducados for the payment of Gregorio’s ransom, even agreeing to pay the ransom of the Christian oarsmen should they be captured during the adventure. This gesture, as well as the fact that Ana Félix vouches for the renegade, should recall the complex business of Viedma and Zoraida’s escape from Algiers in part one. Finally, Antonio Moreno shows further magnanimity when he takes Ricote and Ana Félix into his household as honored guests.

«mercy»






The series of different scenes and events in chapter sixty-two make it among the densest in the entire novel. It centers on Don Antonio’s “enchanted head,” but there are also a couple of seriously meta-literary moments: first, when DQ is paraded through Barcelona with a sign on his back saying “This is Don Quijote of La Mancha,” and second, when he enters the printing shop and actually comes across the apocryphal continuation of his own story. Cervantes highlights the fact that DQ is not a real person, i.e., that he is an artificial construct. Why now? As if to relate this idea to politics, at dinner SP reviews his governance and its aftermath, and as if to relate this idea to religion, at the dance DQ shouts a phrase associated with exorcism. If the magical talking head is in some sense a metaphor for Cervantes’s novel, which is also on display via the signs on DQ’s back and above the printing shop, then the Inquisition is one of the main targets of its satire. The nefarious institution comes off as anti-science and anti-freedom of expression. Cervantes puts his finger on one reason why Spain could not embrace the modern world with the same vigor of a country like, say, England. The printing shop episode is also a fantastic case of meta-literary mise-en-abyme. Cervantes alludes to himself throughout, contrasting his work with Avellaneda’s, and even takes two additional shots at the Inquisition: DQ praises “Light of the Soul,” the kind of Erasmian book that the Inquisition often burned; and DQ notes that Avellaneda’s spurious continuation should have already been burned for being unrealistic. This is a tour de force. What is realistic about a character complaining about a book in which he himself appears? Nothing. Cervantes’s ultimate point: Avellaneda might be entertaining, but he lacks the kind of meta-literary sophistication on display in this very episode.

Chapter sixty-four turns away from meta-literary playfulness and takes first a comical and then a very serious look at the Morisco question. SP’s mistreatment at the hands of the galley slaves is more poetic justice for the sins of Spanish Imperialism and Ana Félix deploys a Byzantine narrative that once again advocates for trans-ethnic love and forgiveness. Hell, even a pair of Turks, almost always murderous dogs in Cervantes’s fiction, are spared being hanged. And to top things off, the symbolically named Antonio Moreno welcomes a Morisco family into his house. This magnanimous gesture does not reflect well on our favorite squire.

Let’s review

“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”— Ayn Rand, La virtud del egoísmo



Don Quijote’s final defeatO ur hero’s ultimate defeat in DQ 2 arrives as something of a shock to most readers in chapter sixty-four. Why here? Why now?

What does this mean? Four aspects of the context of his defeat would seem important. 1) According to the narrator, the wife of Antonio Moreno is delighted to have Ana Félix in her house. This sounds like more criticism of the Expulsion of the

Moriscos. 2) According to the same narrator, DQ is hyperbolic in his desire to defeat Moors. Echoing the tone and content of his advice in DQ 1, he says he is the one to save Gregorio; and echoing his violent destruction of Maese Pedro’s puppet show, he compares his plan to Gaiferos’s rescue of Melisendra from Zaragoza: “it would be better for them to take him to the Barbary Coast with his arms and horse, and he would rescue the young man in spite of the Moorish hordes, just as Don Gaiferos had done for his wife Melisendra.” The question of which type of foreign policy to deploy is front and center. 3) SP sounds eminently reasonable, objecting to his master’s plan on two grounds. First, Gaiferos’s act took place on land, whereas rescuing Gregorio requires crossing the sea. Second, he trusts the go-between figure of the “renegade”: “I trust the renegade, who seems to me a very honest man, very solid inside.” In other words, SP voices a less aggressive policy, noting that the Reconquista was a territorial matter, but that times have changed. 4) When the general of the galley departs, heading east into the Mediterranean, he begs the Viceroy of Barcelona to keep him informed “about whatever happened concerning the liberty of Don Gregorio and the case of Ana Félix.” Is this a plea to “give peace a chance,” as if a strong defense were important but that it should no longer be used for aggression?

In this context, consider the identity of the knight who defeats DQ as well as the location of their battle. On the beach of Barcelona again, DQ “saw a knight approaching him, also in full armor, and who carried a shining Moon on his shield.” When this knight challenges DQ to a duel, we learn his name: he is the “Knight of the White Moon.” Clearly, DQ is confronting Islam at the final limits of Spanish territory. Adding to this sense of climactic destiny, we should also recall DQ’s battle with the “Knight of the Mirrors” in DQ 2.14, whose armor was associated with the Moon –“many small moons made of shining mirrors”– as well as his encounter with the allegorical knight of DQ 2.11, who was also “a knight in full armor.”

Cha

pte

r 64

LESS

ON

29



When the Knight of the White Moon declares to DQ the conditions of their battle, we note themes that have dominated both parts of the novel: DQ’s administration of his estate as well as his soul are at stake: “if you fight and I defeat you, I want no other satisfaction than that, abandoning your arms and abstaining from seeking new adventures, you will withdraw and retire to your village for the period of a year, in which you shall live without laying a hand on a sword and in tranquil peace and profitable serenity, for such is required for the increase of your household and the salvation of your soul.” In other words, DQ’s challenger demands that our hidalgo submit to Aristotelian and biblical commonsense.

I am focusing on how this episode relates to Cervantes’s critique of Spanish politics and values. By contrast, Romantic readers focus on the overt cause of the battle, which is, of course, the fact that the Knight of the White Moon claims his mistress is more beautiful than Dulcinea. The hilarity, as well as the moral, of all this stems from the fact that the identity of the rival mistress does not matter: “I come to do battle with you and to test the strength of your arms, with the goal of making you recognize and confess that my beloved, whomever she may be, is without comparison more beautiful than your Dulcinea of Toboso.” I see no reason why the political implications of the episode cannot be reconciled with the Romantic ones. The identity of the beloved does not affect her beauty. It is as if the Knight of the White Moon had learned from DQ’s insight in DQ 1.25 that the ethnicity of his beloved is irrelevant. Perhaps this is one reason he is victorious.

So the battle takes place before Don Antonio, the Viceroy, and a host of other knights. DQ is defeated, and, anticipating the Romantic hero, he refuses to yield, preferring death to having to admit that Dulcinea is inferior to any other damsel. Note that this time, opposite what happened with the “Knight of the Mirrors,” it’s DQ who cannot lift his visor. Notice also the heavy presence of the theme of death: “Don Quijote, thrashed and stunned, without raising his visor, and as if speaking from within a tomb with a weak and feeble voice, said: ‘Dulcinea of Toboso is the most beautiful woman on earth and I’m the most unfortunate knight on earth, and it is not right that my weakness should undo that truth. Take up your lance, knight, and take my life, for you have already taken my honor.’” The Knight of the White Moon refuses to kill our hero, insisting on the terms of their original agreement, and he turns about and enters Barcelona.

SP is as sad as anyone: “He saw his lord defeated and obliged not to take up arms for a year; he imagined the light of his glorious achievements dimmed, the hopes of his latest promises undone, just like smoke is undone by the wind.” Notice, however, the pun involved in his concern that his master might have been deslocado. This means that DQ might have dislocated a shoulder or broken a bone; but it also means something like “de-twisted,” alluding to the idea that DQ has finally been cured of his insanity.



The conclusion to the story of Ana Félix and Don GregorioC hapter sixty-five clears up the identity of the “Knight of the White Moon” and then returns to the Morisco problem by

finishing up the story of Ricote, Ana Félix, and Don Gregorio. Attentive readers will not be surprised to find that the Knight of the White Moon is Sansón Carrasco. The formal revelation of his identity might therefore seem artificial, but it emphasizes

the thematic contrast between chivalric fantasy and bourgeois realism that we have been studying over the course of the entire novel. For example, Carrasco confesses to Don Antonio that even though his mission is one of mercy regarding DQ –“all of us who know him pity him, and I am among those who have pitied him most”–, he has also been driven by a certain desire for revenge regarding his earlier defeat as the Knight of the Mirrors: “he defeated me and threw me from my horse, and, thus, my plan was thwarted: he continued on his way, and I returned home defeated, ashamed, and thrashed from my fall.” In a way, this alludes to the origins of all violence as reciprocal phenomena. We can imagine a local struggle between two medieval knights spilling over into imperialistic expansionism.

By contrast, after DQ is defeated, Don Antonio and a horde of “boys” follow Carrasco into Barcelona, “until they encircled him in an inn in the city.” It’s the novel’s fifth inn, and none other than the Knight of the White Moon is lodged there, emphasizing the moral of mundane commerce as the antidote to chivalric aggression. The same idea appears when Don Antonio offers to assist Carrasco, and the latter asserts that the “business” is going as planned: “he responded that the business, which he expected would end happily, was already lining up quite well.” The end of militant adventurism is at hand as Carrasco returns home, symbolically placing his armor atop a mule: “his arms tied in a bundle atop a beast, and mounted on the same horse he had ridden in the joust, he left the city straightaway, that very day, and returned home.”

Cha

pte

r 65

LESS

ON

30



Meanwhile, SP’s advice to DQ emphasizes the same moral: “let us return home and stop wandering through strange lands and places in search of adventures.” This is the main lesson of DQ according to later readers like Voltaire or the great Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. And SP himself seems to have learned the lesson: “And properly considered, it is I who have lost the most, even though your grace is the more injured: for I, who abandoned my desire to be a governor when I left government, have still not abandoned my desire to be a count, which will never happen if your mercy refuses to be a king by abandoning the exercise of knight errantry, and thereby sending my hopes up in smoke.”

Cervantes now weaves the philosophical and political discussion between DQ and SP into the remainder of the Morisco plot concerning Ricote and Ana Félix. Don Antonio arrives to report that all is well with Don Gregorio: “Good news, Sir Don Quijote! Don Gregorio and the renegade who went back for him have arrived on the beach! But why do I say beach? He’s already at the house of the Viceroy and he’ll be here momentarily.” DQ receives this news with some contentment, but notice how he still fantasizes about chivalric violence and how he laments his own fate as somehow feminine: “In truth I am of a mind to say that I would have preferred that everything had gone otherwise, so that I would be obliged to go to the Barbary Coast, where, by the strength of my arm, I would liberate not only Don Gregorio but every single captive Christian in Barbary. But, wretched me, what am I saying? Am I not the defeated one? Am I not the vanquished one? Am I not the one who cannot take up arms for a year? Of what use am I, then? Why do I praise myself if I am sooner to man the spinning wheel than lay a hand to the sword?”

There’s a lot going on here. The conclusion to the Don Gregorio affair recalls the more passive version of knighthood modeled by Pérez de Viedma in The Captive’s Tale. And as with Viedma, there’s something autobiographical in this portrait of the mad knight turned into a female spinster (cf. Velázquez’s The Spinners). We might think of the contrast between a soldier and a writer as that between a man and a woman. In this sense, like DQ, Cervantes has been feminized. This same idea clearly drives all the gender confusion around Ana Félix, dressed as an Algerian captain, and Gregorio, dressed as a Moorish woman. Thus, the narrator soon reports that Gregorio has transformed: “even though when he was rescued from Algiers Don Gregorio was wearing women’s clothes, in the boat he exchanged them for those of a captive who had been rescued with him.”

Now Cervantes sutures the gaping wound of the Morisco problem. The image of Ana Félix reunited with Don Gregorio is Neoplatonic. It’s as if the feminine and the masculine halves of the Spanish soul have been reunited: “Silence was what spoke for the two lovers and their eyes were the tongues that disclosed their happy and virtuous thoughts.” Further resolution is provided by the fact that Ricote demonstrates his liberal nature and the renegade rejoins the Catholic Church: “Finally, Ricote liberally paid and satisfied the renegade as well as those who had manned the oars. The renegade rejoined and reconciled with the Church, and through penance and mollification he transformed himself from a rotting limb back into a clean and healthy one.”

“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”— Ayn Rand, La virtud del egoísmo



LESS

ON

31

Ricote’s speech on the Expulsion

T he end of chapter sixty-five contains one of the most controversial passages in all of Cervantes’s writings. Don Antonio Moreno offers to intervene at the Spanish court on behalf of Ricote and Ana Félix. Ricote expresses his doubts, actually defending the Expulsion of the Moriscos ordered by Philip III. The specificity of his discourse is striking. He cites the resolute nature of “Don

Bernardino de Velasco, Count of Salazar,” the man designated to enforce the Expulsion. He deploys a powerful medical metaphor that recalls the Platonic notion of good political philosophy as that which preserves the health of the State: “since he sees that the entire body of our nation is rotten and contaminated, he applies a burning cautery rather than a mollifying ointment.” And he compares Velasco to the 100-eyed giant of Greek mythology: “his eyes of Argos, which he continuously has on alert so that none of our nation might remain behind or hide from him, like a hidden root which in time would sprout again and bear venomous fruit in Spain, presently clean, presently unburdened by the fears to which our numbers had subjected her.”

Think about the radical complexity of this passage. Cervantes has put an elaborate defense of the Expulsion of the Moriscos in the mouth of Ricote, a Morisco who paid the ransom of Don Gregorio and who shared his food and wine with his neighbor SP. Modern readers should recognize the dilemma of what to do about the waves of Islamic immigrants arriving in Europe and the United States. Many critics take this passage as Cervantes’s acquiescence to the policy. This might be true, but it does not make the passage any less problematic. Personally, I would argue that Ricote’s liberal qualities make his speech heavily ironic. It is not inconceivable that Cervantes might be advocating for a policy of mercy toward certain Moriscos. At the very least, Cervantes has given us a painful social paradox: how should we act toward Islamic refugees and even domestic Islamic populations, some of whom want to kill us?

Cha

pte

r 65



The dilemma only gains momentum when Don Antonio states his intention to help Ricote both as a political representative at Court and as his host in Barcelona. Note that he uses the exact same phrase used by Carrasco regarding the “business” of helping DQ: “Once there, I will line up all possible efforts, and may Heaven bring about that which is best... Ana Félix will stay at my house with my wife, or else at a monastery, and I know that the lord viceroy will want my good Ricote to stay at his until we see how I negotiate the business.” Highlighting the anxiety of all of this, Don Gregorio refuses to accept money from Ricote, preferring instead to accept a small loan from Don Antonio, which he promises to repay at Court. The final image of DQ and SP leaving Barcelona reinforces the theme of a pacific retreat from armed conflict: “Don Quijote, unarmed and dressed for travel; Sancho, on foot, because the gray went loaded with his arms.” This echoes the symbolism of Carrasco’s mule, and both of these pack animals loaded with arms echo the one we saw in DQ 2.24.

“Don Quijote, unarmed and dressed for travel; Sancho, on foot, because the gray

went loaded with his arms.”



LESS

ON

32

Tosilos, mailmanT he opening of chapter sixty-six echoes the defeat of DQ in the previous chapter. Our hero looks back on Barcelona and

declares his epic loss: “Here was Troy!... here my fortune finally fell, never to rise again.” It would seem the Reconquista has ended. SP responds with stoic advice: “Valiant hearts, my lord, are just as obliged to suffer disgrace as they are to

enjoy prosperity.” He also points out that “Fortune is a drunk and capricious woman, and above all else blind, and, thus, she sees not what she does nor does she know who she destroys or who she glorifies.” If Machiavelli famously called fortune a woman (cf. The Prince, ch. 25); SP makes her drunk, fickle, and blind. If the Italian political philosopher inaugurated the fallen condition of the modern world with his portrait of the pragmatic prince who must sometimes be ruthless in order to preserve the state against the vagaries of fortune; our first modern novelist pushes the capricious nature of fortune to the point of ridiculousness, and meanwhile he eschews the powerful portrait of a prince in favor of that of a fallen Christian knight. In his response DQ remarks on his squire’s transformation –“You’ve turned very philosophical, Sancho”– and the knight resigns himself to his new status: “now, when I have become an ordinary squire, I will give credit to my words by keeping the one I gave as my promise.”

SP now complains about having to walk and suggests that they follow the ancient custom of leaving the hero’s armaments hanging in a tree as a kind of monument. DQ agrees and even quotes Ariosto (Orlando furioso 24.57): “Let no one move them / who cannot withstand / a fight with Roland.” As an indication that things are now falling apart with increasing speed, DQ is so discombobulated that he quickly changes his mind. SP agrees to the change of plans through a refrain that alludes to a major problem in part one: “the fault of the ass should not be heaped on the packsaddle.”

At this point, our heroes arrive at what is no less than the novel’s sixth inn, where a group of people have gathered. They debate a case in which a fat man, “who weighs eleven arrobas,” has challenged a slimmer man, “who weighs no more than five” to a race. The fat man insists the lighter man be handicapped: “he said that the man he had challenged, who weighs five arrobas, should carry six in iron on his back, and that way the eleven arrobas of the thin man would equal the eleven of the fat man.” It’s SP’s final



judgement. By contrast, DQ is so melancholy that he has practically given up on life: “Respond in due course... Sancho, my friend; as for me, I’m so low I couldn’t grant crumbs to a cat.” Those felines again. SP rules that the fat man should lop the extra weight off his body. The result is general amazement, as all agree to cancel the race and get drunk instead. Moreover, they praise this final indication of SP’s princely wisdom by speculating that our hidalgo and squire are smart enough to go to the University of Salamanca and become rulers: “I’ll bet if they were to study at Salamanca, they’d be court magistrates in a flash.” There’s another dose of political cynicism here: “when a man least expects it, he finds himself with a staff in his hand or a miter on his head.”

Our heroes press on and now we get proof of the arbitrary nature of fortune. According to the narrator, when they least expect it, a man appears walking “with some saddlebags around his neck,” just as we saw SP and Torralba do long ago in part one. The man seems to be a letter carrier. He grasps DQ by the right thigh and declare that his master the Duke will be most happy to learn that DQ is returning to his castle. DQ does not recognize this man, who turns out to be Tosilos, the young man who had played the part of the knight who surrendered to DQ in order to marry the daughter of Doña Rodríguez. This seems to reprise the role of the shepherd boy Andrés in part one. When DQ recalls that enchanters had transformed his enemy at the joust into one of the Duke’s lackeys, Tosilos hushes him and asserts reality: “Quiet, good man... for there was no enchantment at all, nor any transformation of anyone’s face: I entered the field Tosilos the footman and I left the field the footman Tosilos.” Moreover, the Duke was so angered that he gave him 100 lashes. We even learn that Doña Rodríguez has returned to Castile and that her daughter ended up a nun.

Tosilos states that he is now on his way to Barcelona to deliver “a bundle of letters for the viceroy sent to him by my master.” This somehow seems to tie back to the story of Ricote or perhaps to the meta-literary scene in the printing shop. Tosilos then offers DQ and SP wine and cheese. DQ moves on, insisting that “this courier is enchanted and this Tosilos is counterfeit.” As usual, however, SP pauses to join the lackey in food and drink. The themes are peace and commerce: “he and Sancho sat down on the green grass and in peaceful companionship they devoured and dispatched the entire contents of the saddlebags.” A final pun even underscores DQ’s return to sanity as an economic matter. Tosilos observes: “Without a doubt, Sancho my friend, this master of yours is short on sanity.” SP defends his master: “Short? How so?... He never shorts anybody; he pays for everything, and even more when the currency is madness.” The metaphor indicates that, when it comes to madness, his master is in debt to nobody, i.e., that DQ’s insanity is all his own and that it amounts to a small fortune. And yet it hints at the larger lesson on the importance of learning about commercial and financial realities.

“A bundle of letters for the viceroy sent to

him by my master.”






In chapter sixty-four the outcome of the Moorish novel plot involving Ricote, Ana Félix, and Don Gregorio is suspended to allow for DQ’s defeat at the hands of the Knight of the White Moon. Chapter sixty-five reveals the Knight of the White Moon as Sansón Carrasco and brings the Morisco novel to the brink of a happy ending with the possibility of a future marriage between the Morisca and her Old Christian lover, as well as amnesty for her and her father. At the same time, we see our novel’s earthbound trajectory toward bourgeois reality in the fact that Carrasco stays at an inn and articulates his rescue of DQ as a kind of “business.” So DQ’s defeat in the previous chapter would seem to have provided the foundations for, on the one hand, a materialistic end to the chivalric fantasy, and on the other hand, a possible happy ending to the Morisco problem. Ricote’s agonizing and highly ambiguous speech regarding Philip III’s policy of expulsion asks us to contemplate a case of early modern case of ethnic cleansing, and there are no easy answers. Turning to chapter sixty-six, DQ has become melancholic and as he limps home, letters from the Duke pass him on their way to the Viceroy of Barcelona. Meanwhile, SP attempts to cheer up his master, but he also behaves like a calculating judge and then a selfish glutton again. Cervantes seems to want us to contemplate one last time, the philosophical, political, moral, and even economic lessons of Salamanca and Barataria as the very essence of his novel against chivalric militancy.

Let’s review

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”— Monty Python



LESS

ON

33

Arcadia againI n chapter sixty-seven of DQ 2, our hero has ridden ahead and waits for SP in the shade of a tree. He’s depressed about his defeat

and worried about disenchanting Dulcinea. Cervantes’s description of how these melancholic thoughts plague the hidalgo is funny and grotesque: “like flies on honey, thoughts came at him and stung him.” SP arrives and praises the liberal nature of

Tosilos, which causes DQ to affirm again that Tosilos could not have been the Duke’s true lackey. Like SP’s visions of the peasant woman as Dulcinea and Carrasco as the Knight of the Mirrors, DQ says the squire has been deceived again by evil enchanters who want to rob him of his glory. But instead of dwelling on Dulcinea, DQ abruptly turns to Altisidora, asking SP if Tosilos has reported whether or not she still loves him: “whether she has bemoaned my absence or surrendered to the hands of oblivion those enamored thoughts that beset her in my presence?” SP is shocked by DQ’s curiosity regarding the thoughts of Altisidora, but DQ responds that although he might be “un-enamored,” he is not “ungrateful.”

There’s some sort of substitution going on here near the end of the novel: Altisidora and Dulcinea are become interchangeable. It does not take DQ long to turn the discussion of Altisidora back to the matter of Dulcinea’s disenchantment. He is angry at SP’s avoidance of his pledge: “Dulcinea, whom you offend by the retardation of your lashes and the punishment of your flesh, which I would see eaten by wolves and which sooner wants to save itself for worms than provide for the remedy of that poor woman.” He also links SP’s debt to Dulcinea to the squire’s status as his feudal servant: “may the heavens grant you the grace to come to your senses and realize the obligation you are under to help my lady, who is yours as well, because you are mine.” Again, Sancho’s labor is the issue. Is he DQ’s slave or are his lashes voluntary?

Cha

pte

r 67



“I would like, oh Sancho, for us to

become shepherds!”

This discussion ends when our heroes arrive “at the same spot and place where they had been trampled by the bulls.” Instead of melancholy, however, the bulls remind DQ of “the gorgeous shepherdesses and the gallant shepherds,” who, before the encounter with the bulls, had received them into their pretend Arcadia. Arcadia gives DQ new hope. Now he plans to fulfill his promise to the Knight of the White Moon by imitating pastoral novels instead of chivalric novels: “I would like, oh Sancho, for us to become shepherds!”

Amazing here is how rapidly Cervantes produces a concise parody of the pastoral genre along the same lines of what he has been doing all along with the chivalric genre. First, DQ comes up with new names for himself and his sidekick, “the shepherd Quijótiz” and “the shepherd Pancino.” He then reviews the Golden Age theme from DQ 1.11: “We will be given sweetest fruit by the magnanimous hands of the oaks, seats by the trunks of the hardened cork trees, shadows by the willows, aromas by the roses, carpets of a thousand shaded colors by the wide meadows,” etc. SP, of course, is enthralled. He says their friends Sansón Carrasco, Nicolás the barber, and even the priest will want to join them in their new lifestyle. Hilarious names follow accordingly: “the shepherd Sansonino,” “Miculoso,” and “the shepherd Curiambro.” Of course, they will all have lovers about whom to complain and lots of music emanating from traditional pastoral instruments: “flutes,” “Zamoran bagpipes,” “tambourines,” “hand bells,” “rebecs.”



A pastoral parodyN otice how beautifully Cervantes manages to weave into his pastoral parody the same north-south problem that he so often

weaves into his chivalric parody. At the end of his list of musical instruments for their new pastoral lifestyle, DQ adds a Moorish instrument. He explicitly notes that this is awkward, but, in accord with Cervantes’s pro-Morisco attitude throughout, the

hidalgo delights in the mixture: “Well, and what if among all this musical variety we hear the sounds of the albogues?! Then we would have almost all the pastoral instruments.” Hilariously, SP is perplexed by this last detail: “What are albogues?” DQ describes a multi-tubed, flute-like instrument as problematic but still most acceptable accompaniment for the other instruments: “it makes a sound, which, if not completely agreeable and somewhat dissonant, does not cause displeasure and goes well with the rustic sounds of the bagpipes and the tambourines.”

This is clearly a metaphor for the mixed cultures of Spain, which Cervantes feels should still include the Moriscos (Cf. Juan Manuel, Libro del Conde Lucanor 41). Confirming our interpretation, DQ now launches into a long lesson on historical linguistics which emphasizes the Arabic influence on Spanish: “And this word albogues is Morisco, as are all those in our Castilian language which begin with al, such as: almohaza (currycomb), almorzar (to eat lunch), alhombra (carpet), alguacil (sheriff ), alhucema (lavender), almacén (storehouse), alcancía (money box), and others like them, which probably include a few more; and only three words in our language are Moorish and end in í, which are borceguí (high boot), zaquizamí (attic) and maravedí (the monetary unit); alhelí (wallflower) and alfaquí (Muslim scholar), as much for their initial al as for their final í, are known to be Arabic.” Remember the important roles played in previous chapters by words like alcázar (Dulcinea’s palace), aljófar (Zoraida’s seed pearls), alcabala (the sales tax paid by the pig herder), and acémila (the supply mule used by certain priests in part one and the Duke and Duchess in part two)?

LESS

ON

34

“No more proverbs, Sancho.”



SP continues to embrace the pastoral idea. Interestingly, however, he points out that the newly chosen genre also has its dark side, its rape, murder, and death. He does this by hilariously scrambling a number of refrains and literary topics, all in relation to his daughter’s provocative role in their pastoral fantasy. It’s a marvelous passage. Notice how SP does all of the following in rapid succession: 1) he recalls the aggressive desires of Grisóstomo or Eugenio, 2) he cites the same anti-imperialistic refrain used by DQ’s niece, 3) he refers to Antonio de Guevara’s Contempt of Court and Praise of Village (1539), and 4) he alludes to Horace’s famous Latin phrase about death as the great equalizer (cf. DQ 1, prologue): “My daughter Sanchica will bring us food to our hut. But watch out! She’s good looking, and there are shepherds more wicked than naïve, and I wouldn’t want her to go for wool and come back sheared; and also, love and wayward desire inhabit fields as well as cities and pastoral huts as well as royal palaces.” After all this, SP strings together a series of refrains that appear to have nothing to do with anything other than his love for refrains.

The exchange grows even funnier when DQ again criticizes SP’s abuse of refrains: “No more proverbs, Sancho.” But the hidalgo ends up using refrains himself, which causes SP to point out his hypocrisy: “It seem to me... that your grace is like what they say: ‘That’s the frying pan calling the kettle black.’” This is all very funny, but there is anti-authoritarian, anti-Inquisitional, and anti-racist meaning here too. SP has brought up the issue of miscegenation via his concern for his daughter. He has also indicated that there are evil men everywhere. He has used the same quote from Horace that Cervantes used in the first prologue to challenge the artificial nature of social hierarchy. This phrase by Horace, by the way, was popularly translated by one of the most famous victims of the Inquisition, Fray Luis de León. Finally, the last refrain refers to moral hypocrisy, and quite possibly racial hypocrisy. How do we know this? Because it all comes on the heels of a lesson about Morisco and Arabic terms in the Spanish language.

As if asking us to reconsider the meaning of the last refrain, DQ now gives us a definition of the philosophical importance of these short pieces of wisdom: “proverbs are brief maxims, taken from the experience and speculation of our wise ancestors.” With this he says they should rest for the night: “let us retire from the royal highway a ways, where we will pass the night.” With sadness, SP recalls the better meals he received from Diego de Miranda, Camacho, and Antonio Moreno, and then goes to sleep. DQ keeps watch.



PigsC hapter sixty-eight has an interesting subtitle: “Regarding the bristling adventure that happened to Don Quijote.” This

is actually a subtle phrase because cerdo, the popular euphemism for pig, did not exist in Cervantes’s day. Instead, our author has taken his new adjective from the phrase ganado de la cerda, or “herd of bristle,” which alludes to the rough hairs

associated with this animal. In other words, Cervantes prods us to interpret the symbolic meaning of the pigs in this episode.

The chapter’s initial mythological reference to the Moon as Diana seems straightforward. But the fact that Diana is present in the sky but cannot be seen adds a Morisco touch to DQ’s concerns regarding how to disenchant Dulcinea. A curious sociological detail here: DQ has slept “the first sleep” but he cannot sleep the second. This refers to early modern habit of people being active during the night between two separate periods of sleep. The narrator tells us that because SP is carefree, he does not suffer from this wakefulness. But DQ wakes his squire anyway in order to complain about the lashes still needed to free Dulcinea: “On your life, get up and go off a ways from here, and, with good cheer and acknowledged valor, give yourself a good three or four hundred lashes toward those for the disenchantment of Dulcinea.”

Cervantes is weaving together two important themes here: Sancho’s salary and the Inquisition. Once again, the hidalgo formulates his squire’s obligation to him in feudal terms: “Good servants suffer the pains of their masters and share their griefs.” In chapter sixty-nine, we will see feudalism transformed into capitalism when SP finally agrees to perform his penance for a price. Note, too, that SP objects to lashing himself this night on the grounds that he is not religious enough: “I am not such a monastic that I want to wake up in the middle of the night and lash myself.” In this way, Cervantes is preparing us for the mock Inquisitional trial of SP, also in chapter sixty-nine. Notice how DQ responds by lamenting the breakdown of their feudal relationship: “Oh hardened soul! Oh pitiless squire! Oh bread poorly paid and favors poorly conceived those which I have done for you and had planned to do!” He still has hope, however, and cites to the same phrase from Job 17.12 that was used to describe Zoraida’s escape in DQ 1.41 and which is also found on the shield of Juan de la Cuesta on the cover page of both parts of the novel: “post tenebras spero lucem,” meaning “after darkness, I hope for light.” The compound effect links two of novel’s main objectives: criticizing the Inquisition and affirming the employer-employee relationship.

Cha

pte

r 68

LESS

ON

35



For the second time in just three chapters, SP now waxes philosophical. At the beginning of chapter sixty-six, SP had described Fortune as a drunk woman. Here he marvels at Sleep’s power to eliminate all of life’s problems. His metaphor is economical: “general coin with which all things are bought.” He also indicates that Sleep is a great equalizer, for it affects all castes the same way. Finally, he observes that the downside of Sleep is that it approaches death: “Only one bad thing attends to Sleep, according to what I have heard said, and that is that it resembles Death, for there is little difference between a sleeping man and a dead one.” DQ is once again impressed: “I have never heard you speak, Sancho... so elegantly as now.”

The philosophical discussion is now interrupted by “a deep thunder.” SP attempts to protect himself beneath his ass: “he crouched beneath his gray, putting the bundle of arms and the ass’s packsaddle to either side.” This fails, however, and, “without respect for authority,” a herd of six hundred pigs thrashes our heroes: “The herd, the grunting, the drive with which these filthy animals arrived, first threw into confusion and then tossed to the ground the saddle, the arms, the gray, Rocinante, Sancho, and Don Quijote.”

The episode is another case of poetic justice. DQ says as much: “this affront is punishment for my sins, and it is just castigation by the heavens that a defeated knight errant should be devoured by jackals and stung by wasps and trampled by pigs.” The figurative assault by jackals, wasps, and pigs is the antithesis of the pastoral fantasy of the previous chapter. But the primary role played by pigs suggests the specific problem of Jewish or Moorish ancestry. Since both Jews and Muslims refused to eat pork, when these people converted to Christianity, they often made a spectacle of their interest in ham as proof of their new faith. Cervantes mocks the Spanish obsession with blood purity throughout his texts. Here, the humiliating defeat of DQ and SP in the “Adventure of the Pigs” subverts authority and purity, suggesting that both our heroes are impure.

“On your life, get up and go off a ways from here,

and, with good cheer and acknowledged valor, give

yourself a good three or four hundred lashes toward those

for the disenchantment of Dulcinea.”



More indications of Cervantes’s critique of the obsession with ethnic identity follow. SP says that if hidalgos and squires were related by blood, then it would make sense that they would have to share “the punishment of their faults.” But he denies this possibility: “what do the Panzas have to do with the Quijotes?” Similarly, when SP goes back to sleep, “without being bothered by debts or security deposits, or any pain whatsoever,” DQ leans against the trunk of a tree and waxes pastoral again by singing a poem about the trials of Love. The narrator, however, makes a point of subverting the scene’s allusions to Virgil’s pastoral by noting that Cide Hamete Benegeli “does not declare which kind of tree it was.” The intrusion is funny because it is mundane and trivial, mocking picky reader, but it also points out the silliness of ethnic distinctions in an episode that’s all about pigs.

At the end of chapter sixty-eight, Cervantes transitions from the particular ethnic strife of the “Adventure of the Pigs” toward a more primeval scene of war between primitive peoples. The next afternoon, “as dusk fell,” our heroes are surrounded by fifteen men who are carrying “lances and leather shields” and are “very much dressed for war.” These men escort DQ and SP through the countryside as their prisoners. Note three aspects of the encounter. First, once again Cervantes highlights SP’s identification with his humanized ass. When the squire tries to speak, one of the men strikes him with a barb, as if he were a pack animal: “hardly had he given signs of speaking when one of the men on foot struck him with a spiked stick, and then the gray no less, as if it too wanted to talk.” Second, ethnic distinctions collapse entirely when the warriors characterize our heroes as primitive savages: “troglodytes,” “barbarians,” and “cannibals.” Finally, the warriors take our heroes “to a castle which Don Quijote recognized as clearly that of the Duke, where they had been shortly before.” So we have returned to the Duke’s palace, except that this time, instead of experiencing “courtesy and good manners,” DQ and SP are received as “vanquished,” and, upon entering patio, “their fear doubled.” Notice how impossible it is for us not to read the next chapter!

“Adventure of the Pigs”



Sancho, martyr againC hapter sixty-nine opens with a macabre nocturnal scene. The patio of the ducal palace is decorated with hundreds of candles

and torches. In the middle is a giant catafalque covered by a canopy of black velvet. On top of the catafalque lies “the dead body of a damsel who was so beautiful that her beauty made Death itself seem beautiful.” The dead woman’s head rests

“on a brocade pillow,” and in her crossed hands she holds a symbol of her virginity: “a golden and victorious branch of palm.” It’s another theatrical scene, like so many we have seen in part two. On a stage next to the catafalque are seated two kings and also the Duke and Duchess. DQ and SP are seated near the steps of this stage, i.e., in a space between reality and fiction. Finally, the narrator’s rhetorical question underscores the amazement (admiratio) that the scene produces and lets us know whose body this is: “Who would not have been astonished by this, now compounded by the fact that Don Quijote recognized that the dead body that was on the catafalque was that of the beautiful Altisidora?”

The scene now transforms into an explicit parody of an Inquisitional trial of SP. A servant dresses him like a heretic: “a garment of black buckram decorated with flames of fire, and taking off his cap, he put on his head a cone-shaped hat, like the kind given to penitents to wear by the Holy Office.” Note that buckram was also used to bind books. Note also that SP’s hat, “decorated with devils,” makes him an unrepentant heretic, destined to be burned alive. Curiously, DQ’s instinct is to laugh: “even though terror had stunned his senses, he couldn’t help but laugh at seeing the figure cast by Sancho.” We have seen many different cases of laughter in this novel. This one seems to be among the most sadistic.

Cha

pte

r 69

LESS

ON

36



“Even though terror had stunned his senses, he couldn’t

help but laugh at seeing the figure cast by Sancho.”

Now the melodious sound of flutes (remember the albogues?) emanates from beneath the catafalque. A young boy appears with a harp and sings two octaves. Note three important aspects of his poem: 1) it announces that Altisidora has died because of “the cruelty of Don Quijote”; 2) it combines the same verse from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (30.16) that concluded DQ 1 with an allusion to Orpheus’s journey into the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice: “I will sing her beauty and her misfortune, / with sweeter plectrum than the minstral from Thrace”; 3) its first octave is by Cervantes, but its second is an exact transcription of the second octave of Garcilaso’s “Third Eclogue.” In other words, rescuing Altisidora from death is the goal of the artistic production of Orpheus and Ariosto as well as that of Cervantes and Garcilaso. And all of this has something to do with the Inquisitional trial of SP.

The two kings reveal themselves as Minos and Rhadamanthus, two of the three judges of the Greek underworld. Who or where is the third, Aeacus? The judges declare that Altisidora is not yet dead and that SP’s ceremonial martyrdom can rescue her from Hell. They order SP to submit, comparing him to the rebellious biblical King Nimrod: “Soften your heart, tiger; humble yourself, proud Nimrod, and suffer in silence.” SP’s martyrdom consists of a series of comical swipes and slaps to his face, as well as pinches and pinpricks to his arms and back. At first, SP resists, “bellowing like a bull.” Note the allusion to the Morisco issue: “I swear to God, I’ll sooner become a Moor than let them swipe at my face or slap my nose!” A Freudian would add that our squire fears castration: “the devil can take me before I’ll consent to being touched by duennas.”

A fascinating comical aspect of this ceremony appears in the prosaic description of the women who slap SP’s face: “some six duennas in procession one after the other, four of them wearing spectacles, all of them raising their right hands somewhat, with four fingers of wrist exposed so as to make their hands look longer, as is the current fashion.” Like the buckram of SP’s outfit, the women’s glasses make the whole scene allude to the book-burning episode of DQ 1.6. Their shortened sleeves, however, have me baffled. On one level, this detail links SP’s martyrdom to Altisidora’s description of Hell in the next chapter. Nevertheless, there’s something here about religious orthodoxy as a kind of fashion (cf. Mark Twain’s “Corn-Pone Opinions”). Similarly, SP notes that one of the women wears an excessive amount of makeup.

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”— Monty Python



LESS

ON

37

“Alive is Altisidora! Altisidora lives!”

I n the end, DQ convinces SP to suffer his mistreatment, marveling at the power his squire has: “Have patience, my son, and give to these gentleman what they wish and to the heavens many thanks for having granted this virtue to your person, such that by its martyrdom you can disenchant the enchanted and resuscitate the dead.” So SP offers his “face and beard” to the

women and accepts their pinches as well as those of many others present. But the ceremony goes horribly wrong when SP takes action to avoid the pin pricks: “he stood up from his chair, apparently irked, and, grabbing a burning torch that was near him, he went after the duennas and after all the other torturers, saying: ‘Be gone, infernal ministers!’” Notice how this last metaphor turns the ministers of the Inquisition into Hell’s minions.

It is significant that at this precise moment, Altisidora comes back to life: “Alive is Altisidora! Altisidora lives!” Notice the chiasmus similar to that of The Novel of the Curious Impertinent where “Camila surrendered, surrender did Camila...” Note also that DQ immediately recognizes that Altisidora’s return to life via SP’s martyrdom means that his squire can also save Dulcinea: “As soon as Don Quijote saw Altisidora stir, he threw himself to his knees before Sancho, saying to him: ‘Now is the time, son of my soul rather than my squire, to give yourself some of the lashes that you are obligated to give for the disenchantment of Dulcinea.’” Cervantes pushes the feudal relationship to its breaking point: SP is no longer just DQ’s squire but, rather, his own son.

The chapter’s denouement does three things. First, it highlights the primitive sacrificial nature of the ceremony. Lamenting the fact that he is always a scapegoat –“it’s that in order to cure other people’s ills I have to be the sacrificial cow”–, SP asks to be thrown into a well: “Simply take a giant rock and tie it to my neck and throw me into a well.” Recall what Zoraida says her father will do to her when he discovers her intention to go to Spain. Second, it begs the question of whether or not SP is totally innocent. The exiled

Cha

pte

r 70



“Alive is Altisidora! Altisidora lives!”

Morisco Ricote or the shoeless citizens of Micomicón, for example, might find him guilty. Third, the chapter’s denouement highlights the textile theme again. Altisidora promises to give SP more of her clothes: “keep at your disposal, Sancho my friend, from today forward, six shirts that I am sending you, so that you can make six more for yourself, which, if not entirely seemly, are at least clean.” Also, SP requests that the Duke and Duchess give him the tunic with flames and the hat with devils: “for he wished to take them home with him as a memento and proof of that never before seen adventure.” What do textiles have to do with a parody of the Inquisition? Recall that the Expulsion of the Moriscos decimated the silk industry.



LESS

ON

38

The cure forlovesickness is honest work

A t the beginning of chapter seventy, we find another hilarious subtitle: “Which follows sixty-nine.” SP remains profoundly shaken “from the pains suffered during his recent martyrdom.” He also laments having to sleep in the same room as DQ, because he knows his master will want to talk. Sure enough, DQ enters and marvels at the fact that Altisidora died due to his

unwillingness to return her love for him. SP responds that he cannot understand what Altisidora’s love life has to do with his martyrdom. It’s as if Cervantes were challenging us to decipher a riddle. What does love have to do with the Inquisition? Recall the cross-cultural roles of Zoraida and Ana Félix.

When DQ and SP go to sleep, our narrator intrudes to tell us that Cide Hamete intrudes in order to tell us how the Duke and Duchess had planned this last adventure: “They both went to sleep, and during this time Cide Hamete, the author of this great history, wanted to write out and account for what moved the Duke and Duchess to devise the elaborate edifice of the spectacle just told.” This is hilariously absurd! Are we to believe that the fictional Cide Hamete took advantage of the time that our fictional heroes were sleeping in order to write his fiction? In any case, the narrator tells us that Cide Hamete tells us that the bachelor Carrasco disguised himself as the Knight of the White Moon and followed DQ’s trail to the Ebro, where the Duke informed him that DQ had gone to participate in the chivalric festival at Zaragoza. Not finding DQ in Zaragoza, Carrasco made his way to Barcelona where he defeated DQ as told previously. Returning to Castilla-La Mancha, Carrasco told the Duke that he had defeated DQ in order to cure him: “because it was a lamentable thing that an hidalgo so intelligent as Don Quijote should be insane.” Note that like most readers, most critics think that Carrasco is evil. Nevertheless, his attitude accords with the Erasmian role of Diego de Miranda as a more exemplary hidalgo.

The most interesting aspect of Cide Hamete’s long aside is his concluding moral commentary regarding the behavior of characters like Carrasco and the Duke and Duchess: “And Cide Hamete says more: that in his opinion the deceivers are as insane as the deceived and that the Duke and Duchess were two fingers from being fools themselves, since they put such effort into fooling two fools.” This assessment sounds remarkably like that of the angry chaplain in DQ 2.32.



The next morning Altisidora visits DQ and SP, and “following the whims of her masters,” she continues play the part of a forsaken lover. She is dressed seductively and, curiously, leans on a cane: “leaning against a cane of fine black ebony.” Is this merely a symbol of her recent brush with death? Or is it racial? DQ reacts to her appearance in his room by withdrawing, i.e., the same way that he did when Doña Rodríguez visited him. Altisidora gets very upset at being rejected by DQ. She even reworks a verse from Garcilaso’s “First Eclogue”: “Oh harder than marble against my complaints!” She says she died and that she was only saved by SP: “if it had not been because Love, taking pity on me, deposited my remedy in the martyrdoms of this good squire, I would still be in the other world.”

SP responds in two ways. First, he again links himself to his ass: “Love could well... have deposited them in the martyrdoms of my ass, thank you very much.” This grounds the Orpheus theme of rescuing Eurydice from Hell (a major topic of Garcilaso’s lyric) in the idea that it is SP’s lashes that allow victory over death. Second, the squire asks Altisidora about Hell, noting that since she committed suicide, she must have gone there. This opens the door to Altisidora’s wonderful inset story about her vision of the underworld.

Altisidora specifies that she did not technically cross over into Hell. If she had, she would not have been able to return. Nevertheless, she says that near the entrance to Hell she saw a group of devils playing a kind of football game (cf. Berceo, “El sacristán fornicario”). It’s surreal and hilarious at the same time: “The truth is that I arrived at the gate, where about a dozen devils were playing ball, all down to their tights and doublets, with their collars trimmed with borders of Flemish lace, and with cuffs of the same material, leaving four fingers of arm exposed so that their hands would seem longer.” Notice the same weird attention to fashion that we saw during SP’s martyrdom. The devils make a more modest Flemish fashion statement. Altisidora adds that nobody ever wins at this game: “everybody was grumbling, everybody was fighting, everybody was cursing one another.” Cervantes mocks the difference between Catholics and Protestants.

The strangest detail of all, however, is that the devils are playing football with books instead of balls. In another of Cervantes’s great meta-literary moments, Altisidora describes how one of the books that the devils destroy turns out to be Avellaneda’s continuation of Don Quijote. A dialogue between the devils criticizes Avellaneda’s text: “‘Is it so bad?’ responded the other. ‘It’s so bad,’ replied the first, ‘that if I purposefully undertook to make it worse, I could not.’” Altisidora closes by explaining that her love for DQ caused her to remember this scene: “because of having heard the name Don Quijote, whom I so adore and desire.” DQ’s response both mocks the existence of the metaphysical world and continues the meta-literary game: “I am not upset to hear that I walk about as a fantastical body in the darkness of the abyss, or even in the light of the world, because I am not the one told about in that story.”



Next, DQ offends Altisidora by reiterating his loyalty to Dulcinea. By the way, this is a major difference between Avellaneda’s and Cervantes’s novels: Avellaneda has DQ renounce his love for Dulcinea; Cervantes insists this never happens. Altisidora is so angered by this that she goes off script and exposes the illusion: “You think, by chance, Don Defeated and Sir Thrashed-To-Bits, that I committed suicide on your account? All you saw last night was an illusion, for I’m not the kind of woman to let even the dirt under her fingernail make her suffer, much less die on account of such camel-like nonsense.” SP seconds her, declaring that the idea that someone should die from lovesickness is absurd. At this point, the singer from the previous night appears and DQ asks him what Garcilaso’s verses have to do with the death of Altisidora. The poet attributes his quotation to “poetic license.” It’s another meta-literary moment. Cervantes allows a character within his novel to challenge his readers to think about why he cites Garcilaso’s text.

The chapter ends when the Duke and Duchess arrive and DQ announces his departure. Significantly, before departing, both DQ and SP recommend honest work as the cure to Altisidora’s lovesickness. DQ’s comment is particularly ironic because it applies to himself as well: “all of the ills afflicting this damsel originate in idleness, the remedy for which is honest and constant work.” Sancho seconds the idea and recommends a specific type of work: “I’ve never seen in all my life a lace maker who has died over love, for maidens who are occupied think more about finishing their tasks than about their lovers.” The Duchess is impressed: “From now on, I will make sure that my Altisidora occupies herself doing needlework, which she knows how to do very well.” Three observations here: 1) textiles and honest work are the keys to ending everybody’s diabolical suffering; 2) this alludes to the tragic Expulsion of the Moriscos, which effectively decimated the silk industry in Southern Spain; 3) this also refers to the art of creative writing, especially that of Garcilaso, who constantly refers to his own poetry as a kind of woven tapestry. Ironically, Altisidora, as the Duchess says, is very good at weaving.




With chivalric adventure now prohibited according to Don Quijote’s defeat by the Knight of the White Moon, chapter sixty-seven turns toward the pastoral genre. It also contains a linguistic lesson about Arabic, highlighting the struggle between Old Christians and Moriscos. Chapter sixty-eight, a kind of tabula rasa, establishes a trajectory from Dulcinea and Altisidora, meditates on Sleep and Death, and mocks ethnic obsessions via the grotesque “Adventure of the Pigs.” This leads to a primordial look at frontier conflicts between ancient races. Chapter sixty-nine contemplates death in the figure of Altisidora. Like the burning of DQ’s library in DQ 1.6, Cervantes mocks the Inquisition through the trial of SP. Note that the orthodox Catholic ritual of the auto de fe is reduced to paganism and that instead of saving the souls of the damned, it serves as a means of resurrecting the dead love object. DQ’s hilarious reaction to SP’s powers brings all of this back to the issue of Dulcinea’s continued enchantment and reminds us of SP’s pending lashes. In chapter seventy, Cervantes extends his mockery of the Inquisition through Altisidora’s irreverent journey into Hell, where a book called Second Part of the History of Don Quijote of La Mancha is subjected to particular abuse. As usual, Cervantes’s novel is complex. One good takeaway, however, is that metaphysical belief, like lovesickness, results from fashion and laziness. The solutions seem to be art, work, and even sport. Satire is a literary game in which nobody actually gets hurt and everybody wins precisely because everybody loses. Moreover, if we accept that we’re all devils in Hell, perhaps Inquisitions are unnecessary.

Let’s review

“It is the true believer’s ability to shut his eyes and stop his ears to facts that

do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the

source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy.He cannot be frightened

by danger nor disheartened by obstacle nor baffled by contradictions because he

denies their existence.”

— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer



LESS

ON

39

The final negotiation between Don Quijote and Sancho PanzaW e have arrived at the last chapters of DQ 2. Any serious student of the early modern novel, or of the history of the novel

form generally, must account for the final passages of Cervantes’s masterpiece. At the end of part one, Cervantes used the condensed chivalric adventure of the Knight of the Lake, the story of Eugenio, Anselmo, Leandra, and Vicente, DQ’s

encounter with the penitents carrying the Virgin Mary, and the discovery of the lead books to satirize the Spanish obsessions with racial purity and religious orthodoxy. Race and the Morisco problem are again present at the end of DQ 2, but the definitive cure of DQ’s insanity is fundamental as well. This cure involves a turn away from the chivalric genre toward the pastoral, an encounter with a character from Avellaneda’s apocryphal continuation, and, most importantly, deep attention to mundane matters like SP’s salary and DQ’s last will and testament. Oh, and there will be some final meta-literary playfulness as well.

Chapter seventy-one remains one of Cervantes’s most spectacular meditations on the material basis of human relationships and what this has to do with art. The initial focus is compensation for work, specifically, SP’s miraculous power to disenchant and resuscitate the dead. While DQ is saddened by his military defeat, he takes solace in his squire’s ability: “His sadness was caused by his defeat, and his happiness by considering the virtue of Sancho as he had revealed it through the resurrection of Altisidora.” By contrast, SP remains saddened by his lack of compensation, “because he was saddened to see that Altisidora had not kept her word in giving him the shirts.” The squire portrays himself as an unpaid doctor: “I am the most disgraced doctor that could be found in the world, where a physician, upon killing the patient for whom he is caring, wishes to be paid for his work, which consists of no more than signing a prescription for some medicines, which not he but the apothecary makes, and that’s that; yet I, who must pay for another’s health with drops of blood, chin slaps, pinches, pinpricks, and lashes, am not given a farthing.”

Cha

pte

r 71



SP’s complaint leads to a final salary negotiation between squire and hidalgo. DQ agrees that Altisidora acted wrongly: “Altisidora has done very wrong by not giving you the promised shirts.” He then offers to pay SP for the disenchantment of Dulcinea: “For my part, I can tell you that if you wanted to be paid for the disenchantment of Dulcinea, then I would have considered it money well spent... flog yourself, then, and pay yourself a going rate and by your own hand, for you are carrying my money.” It’s an amazing moment. The narrator underscores this by telling us that SP’s inner motivations transform completely: “Sancho opened his eyes and ears a full span and in his heart he consented happily to flog himself.”

Now for the salary negotation. SP begins: “Tell me, your grace, how much you will give me for each lash.” Metaphorically speaking, DQ brings the entire Spanish Empire into play, although he leaves the first bid up to his squire: “If I had to pay you, Sancho... given what this remedy of such greatness and quality deserves, neither the treasures of Venice nor the mines of Potosí would be enough; take measure of what you have of mine there and put a price on each lash.” SP’s calculation is a miracle. He may be an ignorant peasant who repeatedly states that he cannot read, but he sure knows math when it comes to getting paid for his lashes: “let’s consider the three thousand and three hundred, which at a quarter each, for I will not accept less even if the whole world orders me to, amount to three thousand and three hundred quarters, and those three thousand make fifteen hundred half reales, which make seven hundred fifty reales; and the three hundred come to one hundred fifty half reales, which make seventy-five reales, which together with the seven hundred fifty make for a total of eight hundred twenty-five reales.”

DQ is amazed by this transformation –“Oh blessed Sancho, oh kind Sancho!”–, and even offers SP an incentive: “And consider, Sancho, when you want to start your flogging; if you do it soon, I’ll add another hundred reales.” Our hidalgo believes he is on the brink of turning his own “defeat” into a “most glorious triumph.” Once again, Cervantes confronts readers with the ultimate lesson of replacing force with pay for services, i.e., the bourgeois ideal which we have been pondering ever since DQ’s first sally, when he encountered the prostitutes from Seville, the first innkeeper, Andrés and Haldudo, and the merchants of Toledo. But notice the figurative maneuver: Sancho is now in the position of dehumanized victims like Andrés and the slaves of Micomicón, except for one important difference: he will be paid for his lashes. Notice also that the squire’s lashes relate explicitly to the theme of Apuleius’s ass: “making a powerful and flexible whip out of the ass’s halter and bridle, he retired some twenty paces from his master among some beech trees.” Finally, notice that the miracle of SP’s lashes leads to DQ’s moral transformation as well. Our hidalgo expresses great interest in his squire’s well-being –“Look, friend, don’t tear yourself to shreds”– and he counts SP’s lashes in a way that recalls the symbolic rosary of galley slaves freed in DQ 1.22 and the scatological rosary used for his own penance in DQ 1.26: “I will stand to one side counting the lashes you give yourself with my rosary here.”



LESS

ON

40

The seventh innR ecalling Andrés’s suffering at the hands of Haldudo and DQ’s penance in the Sierra Morena, SP now strips naked from the

waist up and begins to lash himself. Hilariously, he immediately wants a raise: “Sancho had probably given himself around six or eight lashes when the joke started to seem burdensome and its price rather low, and, stopping a while, he said

to his master that he considered himself defrauded, because each of those lashes deserved to be paid with a half real, not a quarter.” DQ immediately agrees: “I double the price in play.” Now Cervantes pushes the case further by having SP trick his master by whipping trees instead of himself. At this point, DQ is so moved by his squire’s sufferings that he begs him to stop. Note the Apuleian overtones: “On your life, friend, let this business go no further, for this medicine seems very harsh to me... for the ass, in vulgar discourse, suffers the load but not the overload.” DQ intervenes: “grabbing the twisted halter which Sancho was using as a whip, he said: ‘Let not fate allow, Sancho my friend, that you should lose your life on my account.’”

DQ insists they postpone their “business.” What business is this? On the one hand, paying someone for nothing but their pain sounds like the Marxist nightmare of capitalist exploitation. On the other hand, accepting payment for fake work sounds like the capitalist nightmare of a society ruled by workers. These contrasting perspectives on the employer-employee relationship move between visions in which both figures are victims of each other. Is there a middle ground?

Cha

pte

r 72



Suggesting the answer, our heroes now arrive at the novel’s seventh inn. Surely it is significant that the narrator tells us that DQ recognizes that it is not a castle. In their room hang two cheap paintings of the most important amorous scenes of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid: the kidnapping of Helen by Paris and the suicide of Dido after Aeneas’s departure. The narrator points out that DQ notes that Helen goes willingly –“she did not go against her will”– and that Dido’s suffering is overdone –“she seemed to shed tears the size of walnuts from her eyes.” After DQ observes that by simply killing Paris he could have avoided the destruction of both Troy and Carthage, SP wagers that “before long there won’t be a tavern, an inn, lodge, or barbershop where the history of our deeds won’t be seen in paintings,” although he hilariously hastens to add that he hopes the artist will do a much better job.

In other words, Cervantes compares his art of the novel to these inadequate paintings of the great epics of Greece and Rome. What makes Cervantes’s novel such a unique and modern version of classical epic? Many of the answers are to be found in this scene: its realism, its commercial themes and locales, and its comical dialogues. Also, Cervantes’s novel turns definitively away from military adventurism. Thus, even though SP “wanted to conclude the business quickly,” DQ observes somberly that “we have to save this for our village.”

Chapter seventy-one’s slap at bad paintings alludes to Avellaneda’s apocryphal continuation. How do we know this? Because chapter seventy-two involves an explicit encounter with Avellaneda’s novel. Make no mistake, this is wild stuff. Cervantes has his fictional character, DQ, strike up a conversation with one of Avellaneda’s fictional characters, Don Álvaro Tarfe. Tarfe is headed to Granada, and he relates that he met and befriended a man named DQ, accompanied him to the jousts at Zaragoza, and then left him at an insane asylum in Toledo. But DQ convinces Tarfe that he is the real DQ. The contrast hints at morality as our DQ is referred to as “the good” and Avellaneda’s as “the bad.” SP enters the discussion as well, observing that the other SP is not nearly as witty or funny as he. DQ declares that he has never set foot in Zaragoza and that he much prefers Barcelona as a more beautiful and cosmopolitan city.



Finally, DQ gets Tarfe to sign an affidavit in which he declares that DQ and SP are who they say they are, and not those found in Avellaneda’s novel. Notice how radically meta-literary this all is. Tarfe confirms that he has not seen what he has seen and that he has not experienced what he has experienced: “Again, I say and affirm that I have not seen what I have seen, nor did what happened to me happen to me.” The contractual, legalistic language here is also intense, as is the presence of a “bailiff ” and a “scribe” who faithfully record Tarfe’s testimony. After leaving the inn, DQ and SP celebrate their formalized victory over Tarfe and Avellaneda: “how wise it had been to take his deposition before a magistrate.”

What is going on here? One way of thinking about this chapter is to relate the legal maneuvering to the issue of SP’s lashes. In this way, Cervantes signals to us that the contractual solution to the problem of how to distinguish work from slavery is what makes his novel superior to Avellaneda’s. Thus, when SP mentions his lashes, Tarfe is oblivious: “I don’t understand that part about lashes.” Similarly, SP completes what the narrator variously refers to as his “penitence,” “sacrifice,” and “labor” without any harm to himself. On their surface, these details are explicable. Tarfe doesn’t know the events of Cervantes’s novel and SP tricks his master by lashing trees. But for readers familiar with The Golden Ass as well as El Lazarillo de Tormes, the transformation of the brutality of slavery into a civilized and humane labor contract is precisely the point of the novel form.

Chapter seventy-two’s final trajectory confirms this bourgeois moral whereby DQ must consent to pay his servant: “they climbed up a hill, from which they beheld their village.” SP’s odd apostrophe to their homeland is filled with contradictions that contain ironic indications of the new economic arrangement: “Open your eyes, beloved homeland, and see that your son Sancho Panza returns to you, if not very rich, then very lashed. Open your arms and also receive your son Don Quijote, who, if he returns defeated by the arms of another, he also returns victorious over himself, which, as he has told me, is the greatest victory one can desire. I bring money, because if they gave me a good lashing, at least I went away on a horse.” Notice how SP calls himself poor, but then rich, and how his last comment requires us to think yet again about his magical ass. Notice also the Christian and philosophical theme of the defeat of the self.



LESS

ON

41

Don Quijote turns melancholic and superstitiousA t the beginning of chapter seventy-three, DQ turns morose and superstitious. He overhears two boys arguing, one of whom

says “you’ll never see her in all the days of your life.” He interprets this to mean that he will never see Dulcinea again. Similarly, in early modern Spain the sudden appearance of a rabbit was ominous: “a hare came fleeing toward them,

followed by many greyhounds and hunters, and, fearful, she came to hide and crouch at the feet of the gray.” Sancho grabs the hare and offers it to DQ, who reacts in horror: “Malum signum! Malum signum! The hare flees, the greyhounds follow: Dulcinea will not appear!” Note this amazing trick performed by SP in relation to his gray. Cervantes maintains the Apuleian motif to the very end.

Once again SP is skeptical regarding metaphysical superstitions. He claims that offering DQ the hare should be a good omen. He also asks the boys what they were arguing about. They were arguing over “a cricket cage.” Notice how SP purposefully counters DQ’s panic by purchasing the cage and placing it in his master’s hands: “Sancho took out four cuartos from his pocket and gave them to the boy in exchange for the cage, and then he placed it in Don Quijote’s hands.” This symbolic moment at the end of the novel recalls previous episodes: DQ’s journey home in a cage at the end of part one, and DQ’s triumph over the caged lions in DQ 2.17. By contrast, there are no enchantments or lions here, just crickets and a prosaic commercial exchange.

But Cervantes saves his greatest symbol for last. This symbol signals Cervantes’s understanding of his art of the novel as social satire in conjunction with the modernization of the classical picaresque, i.e., hatred of the Inquisition plus the metamorphosis of the Apuleian ass as a sign of the humanity of others. When our heroes come across the priest and Carrasco, who are praying in a field, the narrator

Cha

pte

r 73



emphasizes that SP has dressed his ass like a victim of the Inquisition: “And it’s worth noting that Sancho Panza had thrown his buckram tunic painted with flames of fire, the one that they had made him wear at the Duke’s castle the night that Altisidora came back to life, over the gray and over the bundle of weapons so that it might serve as a coat of arms, and having also placed the pointed hat on his head, this made for the most original adornment and transformation that an ass has ever seen in the world.” Notice how complex this symbol is. It’s not just a mockery of the Inquisition. Because SP has covered “the bundle of weapons” with the flame-covered robe, the symbol relates the institutional persecution of heresy to the art of war. The question: Is the Inquisition a more civilized alternative to war, or is it simply war by another means?

Now the labor theme resurfaces. As he did at the end of part one, SP explains to his wife that he brings money: “I bring money, which is what’s important, earned by my own industry, and without harm to anybody.” There’s ambivalence here, of course, because SP took ten escudos from the bandit Roque Guinart, because his 200 escudos from the Duke seemed to signal governmental corruption, and because the lashes he sold to DQ were fraudulent. Moreover, his ass dressed like a victim of the Inquisition suggests that the entire Spanish economy is tainted by the unjust treatment of conversos and Moriscos. Note also how this contradicts SP’s previous claim that he returns home “not very rich.” Nevertheless, his statement that he earned his money “without harm to anybody” makes the point that lucre achieved through violence is exactly what the novel satires.

This penultimate chapter ends with a review of the pastoral genre. DQ explains his plans to his friends and family: “he had in mind to become a shepherd that year and to spend his time in the solitude of the fields, where he could give free reign to the expression of his amorous thoughts while devoting himself to that virtuous and pastoral occupation.” The general impression here is that a return to calm attention to one’s local environment should supersede violent, expansionist adventure. Thus, the curate and Carrasco approve: “so that he would not once again leave the village on chivalric campaigns, and hoping that over the course of that year he could be cured, they consented to his new interest and approved his madness as reasonable.” These anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist aspects of DQ greatly impressed later philosophers like Voltaire and Ortega y Gasset.

Nevertheless, as we saw in the cases of Grisóstomo and Eugenio from part one, the pastoral still contains the seeds of rivalry and violence. Thus, the comical excesses of the pastoral remain. Carrasco: “let each of us choose the name of the shepherdess that he plans to celebrate in his verses, and let us not leave a single tree, as hard as it may be, without her name carved and inscribed on it, as is the usage and custom among lovesick shepherds.” By contrast, perhaps the sagest advice comes from DQ’s niece and housekeeper, who urge him to come to his senses once and for all. The niece is distraught: “Here we were thinking your grace had reduced himself again to living at home quietly and honorably, and now you want to get involved in new labyrinths?” The housekeeper is insistent: “stay at home, attend to your estate, confess often, give alms to the poor, and let it be on my soul if that does wrong by you.” Notice how well their advice accords with the model of Diego de Miranda, the Knight of the Green Coat.



LESS

ON

42

“Alonso Quijano the Good”I n chapter seventy-four, death arrives. The opening words of this last chapter echo those found at the beginning of the era’s wills:

“Since human affairs are not eternal, especially the lives of men, proceeding always to decline from their beginnings until they reach their ultimate ends, and since that of Don Quijote had no divine privilege to detain its natural course, it

reached its end and expiration when he least expected it.” Three aspects of the denouement interest us: 1) DQ fully recovers from his insanity, 2) he settles his accounts and leaves his estate in perfect order, and 3) Cide Hamete has the last word, summarizing the significance of both DQ the character and DQ the novel.

How do we know DQ recovers his sanity? He exhibits signs. For example, he sleeps deeply. The narrator notes his “calm spirit” when his doctor tells him death is approaching. Finally, he himself notes his sanity: “Blessed be Almighty God, who has done so much good for me! And so, his mercies have no limit, nor do the sins of men curtail or hinder them.” Again: “I now have my judgement free and clear of the ignorant and gloomy shadows imposed on it by my continual and lamentable reading of the detestable books of chivalry.” And again: “Wish me well, good sirs, for I am no longer Don Quijote of La Mancha but Alonso Quijano, once called ‘the Good’ due to my virtuous life. Now I am the enemy of Amadís of Gaul and all that infinite horde of his lineage; now all the profane histories of knight errantry are odious to me.”

This denunciation of the chivalric novels echoes the opinion regarding these texts found in the writings of humanists like Erasmus, Vives, and More. There are other indications of a humanist finale. As he did in the printing shop in Barcelona, DQ echoes Felipe de

Cha

pte

r 74



Meneses’s Light of the Christian Soul, saying that instead of reading novels of chivalry, he should have spent more of his life “reading other books that can bring light to the soul.” A curious detail is the allusion Carrasco makes to two dogs that he has bought for the purposes of their pastoral life. This echoes the dogs in the prologue of part two, but it might also be an intertextual reference to Cervantes’s other picaresque, The Colloquy of the Dogs, which is also heavily humanist in its outlook.

Just as important as this ideological shift is the return of domestic order. “Alonso Quijano the Good” recites his last will and testament in great detail. His first priority is to settle his debt with SP. He does so in full: “Item, it is my will that, with regard to certain monies held by Sancho Panza, whom I made my squire in my madness, and because there have been between him and me certain accounts, and payables and receivables, and I do not want him to be held responsible for them nor that any accounting be required of him, if there are any left after he has paid himself what I owe him, the rest should be his.” Then DQ leaves his estate to his niece and pays his housekeeper: “Item, I leave the entirety of my estate to Antonia Quijana, my niece... and I wish that the first adjustment to be made should be toward the payment of the salary that I owe my housekeeper for the time that she has served me, plus twenty ducados so she can get herself a nice dress.” This final, healing emphasis on the domestic economy makes sense given that one of the symptoms of DQ’s madness was his failure to manage his estate.

Three final points about DQ’s death. First, hilariously, DQ enters into his will that he pardons Avellaneda for having written a false continuation of his exploits. Second, Cervantes gives us a harsh note of human realism by portraying DQ’s heirs as not absolutely depressed: “The house was in an uproar, but even with all that the niece ate, the housekeeper drank, and Sancho Panza was happy, for the idea of inheriting something erases or tempers in the heir the memory of the grief which the deceased understandably causes.” Finally, in a novel known for its realism, there’s a marvelous vacillation between the metaphysical and the materialistic views of death: “he gave up his spirit, I mean to say that he died.”

The most touching aspect of the novel’s conclusion is Cide Hamete’s intervention. A long final paragraph consists entirely of his voice. It’s also extremely complicated. It starts off as an apostrophe directed to his pen: “Cide Hamete said to his pen: ‘Here you will remain, hanging from this rack by this copper wire, my quill pen, I know not whether well or improperly cut.’” This cosmic pen echoes a Moorish tradition. Then, Hamete allows the pen itself to speak. It signals the end of the Reconquista by reworking a few lines from a ballad about the siege of Granada; it claims that it and DQ were made for each other –“For me alone was Don Quijote born, and I for him: he knew how to act and I how to write, alone the two of us are one”–; and it takes a parting shot at Avellaneda. Finally, Hamete reiterates that it has been his sole intention to counter the novels of chivalry: “my desire has been none other than to make abhorrent to men the false and preposterous histories of the books of chivalry.” Note the Christian moral told by Hamete to his pen: “And with this you have completed your Christian obligation to counsel well those who wish you evil.” In this, Cide Hamete appears to be more Morisco than Arab.


/en



The novel’s final passages cover a range of topics. We begin with the detailed calculations and contractual negotiations between DQ and SP regarding the squire’s lashes. Then our heroes arrive at yet another inn. A reflection on art carries over into the next chapter, where Cervantes again engages with Avellaneda. Through Don Álvaro Tarfe, Cervantes produces another masterful meta-literary encounter that highlights the purely fictional nature of the novel. At the same time, he highlights the theme of the transition from slavery to work. Also, the North-South problem of ethnic conflict in Iberia is present right up to the end. The Zaragoza to Granada trajectory of Tarfe’s journey parallels the final intimate relation between DQ and Cide Hamete. We also get one last brilliant mockery of the Inquisition. In the last chapter, DQ recovers his sanity and places his domestic affairs in order, settling accounts and paying salaries. This is a profoundly bourgeois death. Recall that DQ’s madness was not just a matter of military adventurism inspired by the novels of chivalry; it also involved his inability to manage his estate. Cide Hamete’s final statement reveals that Cervantes was conscious of the scope of his achievement, which will be read everywhere: “in these as well as other kingdoms.” And in what remains perhaps his greatest textual gesture of all, Cervantes fuses his voice with those of Cide Hamete and his pen, acknowledging that Morisco culture can never be fully erased from Spain.

Let’s review

Part II

ActivitiesChapters 24 - 47



San JorgeSan Jorge



Course activitiesChapters 48 - 57

12

Instructions:

Here, you will find an illustrationby Christopher Roelofs representingchapter 50 of the second part of DonQuijote de la Mancha by Miguel deCervantes.

Ask interesting questions, formulaterelevant comments, and, more thananything, respond to some of yourclassmates’ contributions:

Which characters appearin the image?

What is the symbolic significance of the shown elements, actions,and forms?

Image by Christopher Roelofs




12

Instructions:









12

Instructions:









12

Instructions:










12

Instructions:








12

Instructions:






UFM New Media productionUniversidad Francisco Marroquín

Project Management Stephanie FallaText Author Eric Clifford GrafCopy Editing Ainara Herrán Andrea M. Castelluccio Pedagogical Coordinator Lisa QuanIlustrations Gabriella Noriega Sergio Miranda Christopher RoelofsLayout Dagoberto GrajedaWebsite donquijote.ufm.edu/enDirection Calle Manuel F. Ayau (6ta Calle final), zona 10 Guatemala, Guatemala 01010Phone number (+502) 2338-7849

Guatemala, January 2017

This project has been possible thanks to a donationwe have received from John Templeton Foundation.

The opinions expressed by the author is his responsibility and donot necessarily reflect the John Templeton Foundation point ofview.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Copying, distribution and public communication is allowed,providing that the acknowledgement of the work is maintained and it is not used for business. If it is transformed or a secondary work is generated, it can only be distributed with an identical license.

CREDITS

http://donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Education

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha, Part II - chapters 48 - 74 - donquijote.ufm.edu/en