Sancho’s Dream

 

Europe badly needed civil engineering; everywhere the sanitation was a stinking shambles. The all-pervasive reek of horse manure didn’t politely stop at the doorstep and followed you all the way to the bedroom. Nobody seemed to smell it. Born into the rank air and breathing it for all their life, most people never knew any different. So it was well within the style of the period when in Germany a runaway monk doused the Catholic church with the most amazing scatological vocabulary ever. When Martin Luther didn’t throw inkwells at the devil, he obsessed about breaking wind and shitting, even in conversations over a meal. Luther was an oaf, but at the tables of the highborn as well they discussed with gusto the power of a well cracked fart. In Catalonia it still is the most popular topic at lunch. “Inter faeces et urinam nasimur” has been the mode to enter this world since times immemorial. Nothing that has changed here, despite the shining eyes and idiotic smiles in Hollywood’s reenactment of a maternity ward. I should know, I had the stuff on me when I helped giving birth in a taxi. Infant mortality was still very high in the 16th and 17th century, but it would be unfair to accuse the parents of neglect. On the contrary, a new concept of childhood began to emerge and inaugurated the age of the nuclear family where children no longer shared their parent’s bed and enjoyed – or rather learned to hate – a prolonged period of schooling. For the first time in a thousand years, the little ones on early recall were again laid to rest in a marked grave.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was baptized on the 9th of October at Santa Maria Mayor in Alcalá de Henares, the fourth of seven children born to Don Rodrigo de Cervantes Saavedra and Doña Leonor de Cortinas. The father was a surgeon and pharmacist, in other words a quack, like most practitioners of this profession in the 16th century. Dentistry was the art of levering out a molar without breaking the patient’s jaw. Only in the Andes the surgeons of the natives actually cleaned the cavities – with a glowing needle – and did gold and silver fillings, even administered anesthesia. Advances lost to the rest of the world with the fall of the Inca empire.

To make ends meet Don Rodrigo was continually on the move trying to find employment. Cervantes’ childhood was a nightmarish succession of dank basements and shabby lofts with no running water and the loo in the backyard. In 1551 the debts caught up with his father and he was imprisoned. Doña Leonor barely knew how to bring food to the table. Buying meat at the market was an affair of waving away a cloud of flies before the shank became even visible, and nobody had yet told the farmer which end of the potato plant was the edible one. The common staple in Spain was lentils and beans and if you could afford it mutton on Sundays. Only the people of Moorish descent kept a decent table with macaroons for desert. Clothing and shoes was handmade and expensive, and therefore mended and reused as often as possible. For the first time shoemakers paid attention to the fact that people had left and right feet. It made good shoes even more expensive. When nobody was looking the well shod squire, instead of wearing them, would carry the precious pair in his hand to protect it from wear and tear.

The Spain Cervantes was born in had just joined in Union with England; King Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter, Queen Mary, the infamous “bloody Mary,” exchanged vows with Phillip of Spain. The Cervantes-family was a meeting of Jewish dowries with the genome from a long line of soldiers, magistrates and Church dignitaries who all had descended from the same mountain district in the North of Spain that also had spurned the ancestral lines of Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, the Mendozas and Garcilaso de la Vega. The records of the Inquisition considered the Cervantes as second generation “converses;” Spanish Jews who had taken the baptism, which was not entirely fair and surrounded the family with a climate of constant suspicion. On every wall a poster was warning you: "If you see that your neighbors are wearing clean and fancy clothes on Saturdays, they are Jews. If they clean their houses on Fridays and light candles earlier than usual on that night, they are Jews. If they eat unleavened bread and begin their meal with celery and lettuce during Holy Week, they are Jews. If they say prayers facing a wall, rocking back and forth, they are Jews."

Since Torquemada’s LaGuardia trial the Inquisition was on a mission to weed out Spain's entire population of "Marraños," officially converted Jews who secretly continued to observe their old faith. A Spanish Jew who refused to convert, could either go into exile to the Netherlands or take the considerable risk of a secret existence in the underground. Many did. Jews who remained in Spain passed themselves off as good Catholics. They kept only a few words of Hebrew and to this day celebrate only two holidays: Passover and Yom Kippur. They gave up circumcision. In Spain to be seen circumcised was a death sentence. During interrogation the inquisitors also forced the suspect to eat pork. So the Marraños began eating pork. In 1989, in a press interview, a Marraño said: "We never feel it is safe to come out. Those of us who in the 16th century fled from the Inquisition to Holland, stayed hidden there for four hundred years. In 1920 they finally decided it was safe to come out in the open as Jews. Twenty years later nearly all were killed in the Holocaust." The mildest penalty imposed was forfeiture of property, a convenient way to raise funds and cover the legal fees. If the suspect was poor he was paraded through the streets wearing the “sambenito,” a sulfur-yellow shirt emblazoned with crosses leaving the crotch uncovered. Along the way the delinquent received a flogging at every church. Spain has many churches. If still defiant he was submitted to comprehensive torture. Stretched until the joints are giving, the fingernails pulled off and with not a single bone unbroken in his hands and feet, the Church would wash her hands and hand over the victim to the secular authorities for the most entertaining part of the spectacle. If the condemned recanted and kissed the cross, he or she was mercifully garroted before the fire was set. For recanting without kissing, there was quick burning on dry wood seasoned with tar. The stubborn infidel got what he deserved, a slowly roasting on green faggots, a "sweet savor to the Lord" (Exodus 29:18; Ezekiel. 20:41). An example not lost on Queen Mary of England. Her executioners began burning English Protestants. The first to percolate his life-juices into a jolly bonfire, screaming and gasping, was Thomas Matthews, the printer of the Matthews-Tyndale Bible. The next in line was the defrocked Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Everywhere the Protestants prayed for the end of Mary's rule, but this was not even the end of the beginning.

Young Cervantes was sent to school in Valladolid and Seville. He didn’t need encouragement; Miguel soon developed a compulsive urge to read everything he could lay his hands on, not just books and pamphlets: he read the words on every shred of wrapping paper, the signs over the workshops, even picked from the street the crumpled scraps other people had tossed away. His biographer is telling us of the boy peeking into the windows of bookshops, an anachronism, the display window is an innovation of the late 18th century. Young Miguel did enter, like everybody else and take the books from the shelf and read – virtually the bulk of the reading he ever did in his life. On the way home the lad took a detour through the Calle Calatrava for a peek at the balcony of Doña Maria del Pilar. She was a sight to see! On a good day she used to lean over the cast-iron banister, fanning herself, the raven-black hair tied together in a glossy bun, little droplets of sweat on her bare shoulders, every pubescent boy’s wet dream. On a very good day, Maria as if by accident, would tuck at a crease of her wide falling skirt and Miguel could catch a glimpse at her merkin, the only thing she wore underneath. It was studded with green stones, emeralds her patron had brought with him from the West Indies. The last time Cervantes saw the Pilar, she covered the lower half of her face with her fan. In the mirror she had discovered an ever so slight deformity of her nose, something she had been trying to ignore for months. It was the first sign of syphilis, another gift from the patron with the emeralds. This too, was an import from the West Indies in exchange for the measles and smallpox. Maria del Pilar died three years later of mercury poisoning. “Puta la madre, puta la hija, puta la manta, que las cobija.”

In 1568, the records tell us of Cervantes’ enrollment in Madrid at the school of Juan López de Hoyos, a scholar of a new breed of secular humanists. De Hoyos was a student of the jurist Francisco de Vitoria of Salamanca (1492 – 1546). De Vitoria is now remembered as the “father of international law.” He was the first to raise his voice against the abuses of natives in the West Indies. The debate over the brutalities in the Spanish colonies carried on until the native population virtually looked extinction in the face. But it was a genuine debate of the kind as you could have it only in Spain in those days.

We cannot be sure about Cervantes’ curriculum. Probably plenty of the liberal arts and little instruction in the realities, and here and there the astonishing flight of fantasy. "I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the Earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, and half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions" (Giordano Bruno, On the Cause, Principle, and Unity, 5th dialogue). This was not likely to remain unnoticed by the ecclesiastic thought police. Atheists who became careless and didn’t keep it to themselves, were still burned alive as a matter of course, like an otherwise unknown Parisian goldsmith under Charles IX in 1573, or the notorious Lucilio Vanini (1585 – 1619). But even in our modern age one can still run into the oblivious intellectual, himself protected by the first amendment, who is defending as "due process" and “cutting edge of the law” the sinister machinery of an institution, that, if it had still the power, would abolish his privilege of free speech first thing. It has always eluded me what possible motive a modern historian can have to find excuses for the Inquisition? By carefully misdirecting our attention to periods where comparably few had actually been burned and leaving out the years that would spoil the statistic, these “experts” want us to believe that the scandal lies only in the numbers and that it wasn’t really that bad. But what about the victims who weren’t killed? What about the climate of suspicion, the habitual look over your shoulder, the sudden hush when a stranger listens into the conversation? What about the one’s who were “acquitted” after been pulled over the rack? The one’s who “recanted” when shown the instruments of torture, like Galileo?

The Dominican tribunals conducted their interrogations behind closed doors and without witnesses; the procedure was calculated to create a pervasive climate of fear and mutual incrimination in the community. Testimonies were kept confidential, two testimonies sufficed to summon a suspect, people were subjected to interrogation without being informed of the indictment. All this was in gross violation of secular law, even then; so was the admission of testimony from criminals and people openly hostile to the defendant. Due process? The atrocity was in the process! Even the corpses were no longer safe in their graves and exhumed for posthumous auto-da-fes. Cutting edge indeed!

In Prague, the German emperor’s court-astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was in the middle of computing his three laws of planetary motions. Between calculations the astronomer had to beg his imperial employer for leave – “family business, Your Majesty, my mother.” She was indicted for witchcraft and keeping company with the devil. After eight anxious months Kepler saved the old woman from the stake, but not from being tortured. They drove cinders under her fingernails and broke every bone in her feet. I’ve mentioned Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). His predicament was the fact that he was a renegade Dominican, the very order which had spearheaded the persecutions by the Church for centuries. Bruno had left the order on his own accord; for the Dominicans he was a traitor. The worst that possibly could happen to him was to fall into the clutches of his former brethren. And this was exactly what happened. Bruno became a prisoner of the Republic of Venice, but on request was extradited to Rome. For six years, between 1593 and 1600, Bruno became a guest in the dungeons of Pope Clement VIII (1536-1605), ironically one of the better Popes. As one time Dominican, Bruno was intimately familiar with inquisitorial procedure, he could not realistically have hoped to beat the system. He played for time, obtained reprieves for reconsideration, signaled willingness to recant, then retracted. Finally Bruno was running out of options. On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno, choking on a gag that prevented him from screaming or saying any memorable last words, percolated his life juices into a heap of slow smoldering faggots, a chained and blinded bundle of gargling pain. Bruno’s books received the ultimate honor of being placed on the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum and have remained there ever since.

There is no way of knowing how these events have affected the young Cervantes. He was proud to be Spanish and a proud defender of the Catholic faith. He was a contemporary of Ignatius of Loyola (early October, 1491 – July 31, 1556) and of Theresa of Avila (1515 – October 4, 1582). The Jesuits spearheaded the counter-reformation. The uprising of the “Moriscos” – people of Moorish origin, mostly Moslems – in Granada was not something Cervantes possibly could have welcomed. The rebellion was put down with utmost brutality and coincided with the assassination of 3,000 French Huguenots on Bartholomew’s Eve in Paris. But the news that more than anything else captivated young Miguel’s fancy came from the Netherlands.

The massacres in Flanders are easily the most atrocious and cruel war ever fought against one’s own subjects before Pol Pot set himself the task to catapult Cambodia back to the Stone Age. The Prince of Orange was leading the levies of the householders against the indomitable squares of Spanish infantry and suffered defeat after defeat. In 1576 Spanish troops sacked the city of Antwerp and put many of the burgers to the sword. A young man like Cervantes would of course see only the glory, the kind of ceremonial splendor on parade as we see it commemorated in Diego Velasquez’s painting “Las Lanzas.” Driven to despair, the burgers of Alkmaar finally opened the dykes and drowned infantry and horses of their tormentors in the North-Sea, and with them their own cattle and arable land. The King of Spain reluctantly agreed to a truce of twelve years with the United Provinces, and Holland became independent. The Spanish equivalent of Pol Pot, the 3rd Duke of Alba ((October 29, 1507 – December 11, 1582) was relieved of his command. It was not because of his conduct in the Netherlands that Alba fell from grace. He was held under house arrest for a sexual peccadillo. Yet Spain still needed this butcher. Back in 1494 the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (1431 – 1503), a vigorous philanderer who’d sired 61 children and lived in incest with his own daughter, had issued an encyclical, in which he bestowed the New World and all of Asia on Spain and Portugal, Spain receiving the lion's share of the West Indies. From now on, the Sun would never set over the empire of the Spanish kings, and ninety years later King Philip II saw the time come for a hostile takeover of the competition. He was backed up by the biggest financial power on the planet. These days Augsburg is just a dot on the Bavarian map. In 1582 it was home to the Fuggers, then arguably the wealthiest dynasty of bankers on the planet; wealthier even than the Medici. Augsburg was the financial capital of the world. The Fugger’s palace was roofed with copper, something seen elsewhere only on churches. Augsburg offered many entertainments. There was a hippodrome with daily spectacles, summer houses of the Fuggers, with fishponds, water organs, water clocks, zoological gardens. A French visitor saw for the first time in his life a pair of ostriches. A wooden aqueduct fed into the water tower, and from the tower into countless conduits, keeping the wells in every district flowing with fresh water, even delivered directly to a hand pump in your house. So when the king of Spain informed the Fuggers of his intentions he received their nod of approval. He didn’t expect anything less.

King Phillip recalled the Duke of Alba and put him in command of the campaign against Portugal. The duke was his old self and victorious as expected, but throughout the campaign the old geezer was constantly held snapped in iron. Financially the campaign was the straw that broke the camel’s back and King Philipp II declared bankruptcy for the third time in his reign. As before, the Fuggers bailed him out, this time in exchange for a franchise in the Amazons. But when Phillip III followed his father’s example and again declared insolvency, it was one time too many, even for such a financial powerhouse as the Fuggers. Today the Fugger-Bank is still owned by the same family, now a member of Germany’s dwindling nobility. No more a big bank by any means, yet still controlling half of Augsburg’s real estate and offering specialized services to clients from the region’s elite.

While he needed it most, not a single escudo of the Fugger’s money ever found its way to Cervantes. After only one year, he ran out of funds and had to give up his studies; the army seemed the obvious choice. He and his brother Rodrigo accompanied Cardinal Guilio Acquavita on his travel to Rome as his “camareros” his valets. In return the cardinal helped the two young men to buy a commission in the fleet of Don Juan de Austria. Europe was embroiled in a life and death struggle with the Ottoman Empire. It would have been difficult to tell who was the more advanced power of the two: the Turks invented inoculating and dressed the wounds of their soldiers with slices of moldy bread, the first known instance of administering penicillin; the Europeans had the bigger guns. On October 7, 1571 it came to the ultimate showdown at the Greek island of Lepanto, the last engagement of two fleets entirely composed of galleys. The 24 year old Cervantes served as an ensign on board of the “Marquesa.” In the melee he received three gunshot wounds, two in his chest, and his left hand was maimed for life, perhaps was even amputated. The admiral inspected the wounded and shook Cervantes by his remaining hand. It was the high point in Cervantes entire life. He remained hospitalized for six months. In 1575 he and his brother embarked for Spain on the galley “El Sol.” The ship was captured by pirates and the brothers were held for ransom in Algiers. Rodrigo was ransomed in 1577. Miguel spent another three years imprisoned in Algiers until his family could raise 500 escudos. He returned to Madrid to a life in poverty. Whether the tales of his failed escapes during imprisonment are true is everybody’s guess, but when the Inquisition was about to raise charges of misconduct, Cervantes instructed a notary to collected eleven depositions by fellow inmates who seem to confirm the moving story of his heroics.

After his return, the first thing to do for Cervantes, was to knock up a girl. The liaison with the actress Ana de Villafranca produced a daughter. It was Cervantes’ only child, and Isabel would become a great comfort in his old age. On December 12, 1584, the 37 year old Miguel married Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a woman almost twenty years his junior, the daughter of a well-to-do peasant. The narrow rooms at home were crowded with women, his wife, two unmarried sisters and his mother. Not much space for privacy. The marriage remained childless, it seems the two had not much joy with each other. On one of those not altogether happy days a tourist from France paid the veteran of Lepanto a visit in his home. What Cervantes couldn’t know was that his visitor reported back to the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592). He described to him the Spanish writer as "Old, (sic!) a soldier, a gentleman and poor." Neither Montaignes’ informant nor Montaigne himself had any idea of the fame Cervantes one day would earn for his Don Quixote. The budding author didn’t know it himself. Nor his wife. Divorce was of course out of the question in Catholic Spain; but after an argument too many, Cervantes walked out on his wife and her dowry at the very moment when after a number of odd jobs he finally had secured a position as a government official in 1588, requisitioning wheat and olive oil for the Spanish navy. Doña Catalina joined a Franciscan convent. For Cervantes this seemed the opportunity he had been waiting for, for so long. Madrid was about to prepare the invasion of England. Yet things didn’t go well, and not just for the Armada. The magistrate of Ézija arrested Cervantes on charges of taking possession of merchandise belonging to the deacon of Seville’s Cathedral, and selling it illegally. Cervantes found himself imprisoned in Castro del Rio, albeit only briefly. Worse was to come. He acquired a commission to collect tax arrears in Granada when the banker in Seville, with whom he had deposited the collected revenues, folded, and his promissory notes went up in smoke. The promissory note was around long before the introduction of government backed paper money. It caused the often violent booms and busts of Renaissance economy. So, not surprising, the royal auditor was not in a forgiving mood. Cervantes was imprisoned for the shortfall of taxes and served two prison sentences in 1597 and 1602. There is a persistent legend that the Don Quixote was conceived during the second imprisonment.

It was during his first prison term that people suddenly saw rats tumble out of the sewers and water pipes, and running circles before dying in the streets. The sign of the plague. In Italy a new sanitary method was tested for the first time. For centuries quarantine would become the most successful weapon in the war against epidemics. But this was Spain. Perhaps it was the forced confinement in an unaffected region, that has saved Cervantes’ life. Quarantine worked, but it didn’t improved much of the personal hygiene. Whether you walked in the washed out linen smock of an artisan or wore tailored to measure haute couture with embroidery and laces from Brussels, in no time your outfit was coated with a film of grease and soot, and even in bed you kept your shirt on, not out of modesty, but because you didn’t want to crush the bugs with your bare skin when you and your lover rolled in the sheets. “Isabellen” has become the name for a chest-nutty color since Queen Isabella of Castile had sworn an oath to never take off her shirt, not even for her husband, until Granada was fallen. It was a white shirt in 1469 but Granada fell in 1492. The only two places where people were putting any value on cleanliness were the Netherlands and feudal Japan. Dutch laundry companies laundered linen and shirts for clients from all over the world, even from clients in the new founded St. Petersburg in Russia, the ascending superpower in the East. Everybody else smelled. Michelangelo, strictly following his father’s instructions, never ever washed or took a bath. What was the point anyway? Within minutes after stepping into the street, you had splashes of urine and horse manure all over you.

After his release, Cervantes looked for opportunities overseas. The Portuguese were the first European nation to establish emporia on the Indian west-coast, trading spices, but made no impression on the Mogul ruling in Delhi, Akbar the Great. Akbar (1543 – 1605) presided over a hitherto unheard of period of prosperity and religious tolerance in his dominions, even abolished the poll tax for the non-Muslims among his subjects. Not surprising the Muslims saw in him an apostate. The Portuguese were also the first Europeans who had a trade agreement with China. Macao was the emporium for the exchange of Spanish silver from the Indies against silk and porcelain. The Mexican silver dollar became the new standard of Chinese currency until 1911. The friar Gaspar da Cruz wrote a book on China, her geography, provinces, ruling classes, bureaucracy, shipping, architecture, farming, crafts and trade, clothing, religion, education, and justice. The book was published in 1585 and initiated in Europe a fad for fine bone china on the table and painted screens with bamboo and pagodas on it. From 1602 until 1682 the Dutch East India Company held a monopoly on trading porcelains. Spain’s trade with China went through the Philippines: “The list of rarities traded, I could never finish, nor have sufficient paper to write it down," said the governor of Manila, Antonio de Morga (1559 – 1636). The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552 – 1610) was the first European allowed into the Forbidden City, while across the Sea of Japan, a local swordsman nailed a paper on the billboard of Kawakami, on which he announced his willingness to accept the challenge of everybody who dared. A thirteen year old boy did dare, and clobbered the man to death with a bamboo stick. This made him famous and later he wrote a book about his exploits with the sword; managers and businessmen still read it before they move on to Sun Tzu. But Musashi was already an anachronism in his own days. In the battle of Okehazama, in 1560, thirty-six years before this duel, Oda Nobunaga’s motley band of sixteen hundred musketeers, shooting with their backs to the stockade, had destroyed the mounted charge of 25,000 mounted samurais. A sign for things to come. Oda’s successor was the first to lead Japanese troops into Korea and China. The adventure ended in hasty retreat; next time the Japanese would be better prepared.

No doubt, service in the East was fraught with danger. Especially for a person pushing on the bad side of fifty. The Dutch had learned it the hard way. 50% of their colonial personal died of the yellow fever. Pardoning a convict and sending him to serve in Malaya was considered a death sentence. What was the alternative? It seemed obvious.

In Mexico, the Aztecs had an unkind habit of ripping out the beating heart of their POWs, but they had found their match when Cortez and his conquistadores forced entry into their capital Tenochtitlan, the biggest and best sanitized city on the planet. To extract information of hidden treasure, the feet of the last Aztec emperor were expertly burned to charcoal. He kept his lips sealed, not even a moan, and without much ceremony the Spanish hanged him from a tree. Hanging in those days meant dangling head down strung up by your ankle. You die a slow death; but in this case the foot didn’t carry the weight. Further South, in the Andes, a gang of Illiterate pig herders from Estremadura had cheated, robbed and murdered their way to inconceivable riches. It brought down the biggest empire in the Americas but the Inca nobility branched out and infused their blood into the genealogies of European aristocrats. The less high born fared worse, and the Quechua nation was consumed in the mines of Potosi at such alarming rate, that Bartolomé de las Casas (1484 – 1566) raised his voice. He was of the Dominican order, the bloodhounds of the Inquisition, but Las Casas’ passionate fight for the rights of the native Americans almost redeems the order. That is, until he advanced the idea to import the “more durable breed” of African slaves to work the mines in the West Indies. The idea here was that Africans are less human. It inaugurated a holocaust. Hegel somewhere says: “Whenever you instigate something considered beneficial you can be sure that it is setting in motion an unforeseen factor that achieves exactly the opposite.” Conservative figures speak of 400,000, if not 4,000,000 Africans, thrown over board during transport; and not just the corpses. Individuals too ill, too undernourished, too defiant, were left to drown in the Atlantic. We know of slave runners who threw their entire cargo into the sea because the insurance was more profitable.

So all things considered, this seemed a no-brainer. Cervantes applied for a position in the West Indies; it would not have been a picnic either, but everything was better than waiting to die with the debt collector on the doorstep. The application was turned down and in 1604 in Valladolid, Cervantes gave up any attempt to find patronage at the court. He returned to Madrid and with his daughter settled permanently in the Calle del León in 1606. He produced plays politely received, and poems that failed to rouse enthusiasm. Oh, he won first price in an amateur contest: three silver spoons. On one of those days he was working in his study, when Isabella called her father to the window. Together they witnessed how a man, a nobleman as it turned out, was assaulted and fatally wounded in front of the house entrance. The police promptly arrested every member in Cervantes’ household, including his daughter, on suspicion of being accessories to the crime.

Was there anymore that could go wrong? One is getting the feeling, that with Cervantes the term “looser” acquired an entire new meaning. A situation of constant defeat and being thrown back to square one. It gnaws at your barf centers. This world was crying out – screaming out – for an escape, any escape; and Cervantes delivered. He published the Don Quixote.

His objective was to write rough and tumble comedy, not a character study or an essay on modern sensibilities. More than anything else, he aimed for the laughs, and he aimed low. He wrote in a period when people considered it an entertainment to play practical jokes on the mentally ill, the rougher the merrier. Fiction is the art of telling a pleasing lie. It doesn’t fail because it is telling a falsehood, it fails if it fails to please. The pleasure invariantly lies in the mode of telling. The one theoretical book a budding novelist may read with any benefit at all, is not Aristotle, not the Ars Poetica by Horace, and most certainly not Northrop Frye’s Anatomy, but a primer published in small print round about the time before Cervantes had finished the first draft of his novel: “When to Lie and How,” by the Jesuit and casuist Thomas Sanchez (1550 – May 19, 1610).  A modern therapist will not fail to notice that Sanchez initially was rejected to join the order because of his stammer.

One must admit the Don Quixote is getting off to a bad start. After the first few chapters the author has to bring his hero back home and start all over again. The lack of plan is painfully obvious; inserted novelettes from Cervantes' pot boiler fill the gaps of a flagging imagination, the old man – Cervantes wrote the first draft in his late fifties – struggles to find his rhythm. So many commentators have written about the book and its author, that it would be silly of me to add another commentary. Everything has been said, much better and with more erudition than I could even dream of doing. Except perhaps for something that is easily getting lost in the maze of high-minded exploration; the motif of money is threading through this novelistic day-dream with great persistence. The Don’s antics are the cause for uncounted damage, and from the money in the Don's purse, his squire continues to square the accounts with the patience of a saint. It is a slim purse and that it should last through 1,200 pages of a meandering but strangely engaging story is a minor miracle by itself. The reader is beginning to wonder; who is the daydreamer here? Perhaps the novel is more of a peek into the mind of the Don’s squire, than actually the narrative of the adventures by his deranged master? Who is the real madman of the two? Oh if only there would be an island waiting at the end of the journey. The novel had grown into something the author hadn’t anticipated.

It became a success! Even commercially and against all expectations by the skeptical publisher. As always publishers know nothing. Francisco Robles thought so little of the book that he didn’t bother to secure the copyrights outside of Castile. So when Lisbon and Valencia launched new editions, it is not quite fair to call it piracy, but of course the author suffered for his publisher’s negligence. The Don Quixote instantly had become an international best-seller, generating revenues for plagiarists like Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda who published a sequel to the first part before Cervantes could come out with his own. There was a river of money to be made, but it evaded the author. Cervantes produced late Indian summer of exemplary tales about love, idealism, gypsy life, madmen, and talking dogs, some of his best prose, published in 1613, the time of the last great exodus from Spain, when Madrid exiled all the remaining Spanish Moriscos who refused to be baptized. It was also the decade when the greatest European politician, perhaps not just of this period, Cardinal Richelieu, rose to power. Cervantes died on the 23rd of April. There was an eleven day difference between the antiquated Julian calendar the English still used and the Gregorian calendar in Spain, but it is convenient to think that Cervantes and Shakespeare died in the same night.

We are almost certain that Shakespeare had read the Don Quixote in Thomas Shelton’s rendition of the first part from 1611; the translator claimed to have finished his job in twelve days flat. Cervantes went into the long night without ever having heard of Shakespeare. Why should he? The Spanish had Calderon, Lope de Vega and the Mexican Tirso de Molina. They had him. Cervantes was buried in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity. The exact place of his grave is unknown.

© - 9/1/2008 - by michael sympson, 6,000 words, all rights reserved