Quixote

by Ilan Stavans

  As for what one might describe as glaring mistakes, the most often discussed is the impossibility of Sancho’s donkey being stolen in one scene (First Part, chapter XXV) and reappearing soon thereafter, without explanation. Another one relates to the various names of Sancho in the First Part (e.g., Sancho Zancas) as well as his wife’s different names (standardized, finally, as Teresa Panza). Obvious mistakes aside, the most unwieldy problem in El Quijote, aside from its length, is its stylistic carelessness. Cervantes was not a meticulous craftsman. His sentences go on and on and on and on, and so on. An idea that might be summarized is expanded without reason.

  Some of these inconsistencies might be owed to the fact that Cervantes didn’t have a copy-editor or editor responsible for overseeing the entire manuscript. In the early seventeenth century, there were correctores, typographers in charge of spotting obvious printing errors, but they weren’t in charge of streamlining the manuscript. We might guess his mistakes are the result of haste, that he was impatient, even impulsive. But these are only guesses.

  IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE THAT, barring the existence of El Quijote, Cervantes would not be remembered today. Centuries after his death, he remains an enigma. As in the case of Shakespeare, his contemporary (under the Julian calendar, they died the same day), material related to Cervantes’s life is extraordinarily scarce. What we do know is recorded in a handful of useful, recent biographies, such as the ones by William Byron (1978) and Jean Canavaggio (1991), and also gleaned from the unreadable, multivolume “life” written by Luis Astrana Marín during the early period of the Francisco Franco regime, between 1948 and 1958. There is speculation about Cervantes’s exact birthday, but it is known that he was born in Alcalá de Henares, some twenty miles from Madrid, in 1547. A certificate of baptism and another one of death are available. There is discussion about his having been a converso, that is, a recent convert to Christianity or a member of a recently converted family, although there is a statement dated in 1569 in which he claims limpieza de sangre e hidalguía, purity of blood, meaning he was not, at least on paper, a so-called New Christian. Still, suspicions remain, since Jewish converts and their descendants often swore, out of fear, to be cristianos viejos. A scattering of other legal documents has survived, among them one detailing a fistfight in which he was involved on the doorstep of his home. But there is little else. No correspondence survives, nor does any other type of record describing his personal or artistic habits.

  Although people connect Cervantes with the seventeenth century, in which he published and died, he was in fact a citizen of the sixteenth. He spent most of his adult years living under the rule of Philip II, the king of Castile, whose abuse of power pushed Spain to its disastrous defeat against England in 1588 and whose unstable, almost paranoid views brought along a series of near bankruptcies, the first in 1557, the last in 1596. In spite of its trans-Atlantic military enterprises, which the king consolidated, the nation under him existed in an atmosphere of instability. King Philip III, his successor, named monarch in 1598, was even worse. His diplomatic reputation was mediocre at best. In fact, it is often repeated that Spain’s sharp decline took place under the leadership of his corrupt chief, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, Duque de Lema, during the early years of Philip III’s reign, which lasted until 1621.

  Cervantes lived at different times in Seville, Valladolid, and Madrid. We know very little about his early years. Perhaps he was a student, maybe even a rowdy one. In 1569, he left Spain for Italy after he wounded a certain Antonio de Segura in a duel. Italy, an artistic and cultural hub in the late sixteenth century, was an obligatory stop for anyone dreaming of making a career in literature. Italian authors play a significant role in El Quijote, as in Cervantes’s references to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the inspiration he took from Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  In Italy, Cervantes enlisted in the Infantería de Marina, the Spanish Navy Marines, which was stationed in Naples. After a year, he boarded the Marquesa, part of a fleet that was controlled by the coalition of the Holy League, which included, along with Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy, and the Knights Hospitaller, who were based in Malta. The mission was to confront expansion of the Ottoman power. In the Battle of Lepanto, on October 7, 1571, he was injured, permanently losing the use of his left arm.

  On his way back from Italy, the boat he was sailing on from Naples to Barcelona, the Sol, was assaulted by pirates. He and his brother were taken to Algiers, where he was held captive for five years. He tried to escape four times, and on the next attempt he was finally able to flee. El Quijote includes a novella, The Captive’s Tale (First Part, chapters XXXVIII to XLV), possibly inspired by these incidents.

  After writing La Galatea, to which he promised but never delivered a sequel, Cervantes seemed to have trouble getting his work published. Then, when the First Part of El Quijote appeared, the enthusiastic response from readers opened opportunities for him. Between then and the publication of the Second Part a decade later, three other works were printed: a series of mid-size narratives called Exemplary Novellas (1613), the satirical poem Journey to Parnassus (1614), and his Comedies, the latter a volume that included an assortment of entremeses.

  Thus, Cervantes, in his last phase of life, experienced an outburst of creativity. But nothing he wrote came remotely close to earning the accolades lavished upon El Quijote. Indeed, the knight-errant’s adventures became so popular that people clamored to read a sequel. As in the case of La Galatea, Cervantes promised one but once again was slow in delivering it. Taking advantage of Cervantes’s procrastination, another author, using the pseudonymous name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, whose full identity remains a secret, came out with a fraudulent Second Part in 1614. (I will discuss this pseudo-Quijote in chapter 4, “A Modern Novel.”) Cervantes was rightfully incensed. He quickly completed his own Second Part. Fate was generous to him, for he had just enough time to complete and publish it before he died, a few months after its release.

  When asked about himself, he glorified his career as a soldier. In one of the most celebrated passages of El Quijote (First Part, chapters XXXVII and XXXVIII), about the opposition between arms and letters, Don Quixote, perhaps acting as the author’s surrogate, endorses the former in an eloquent speech. “Away with those who assert that letters have the preeminence over arms; I will tell them, whosoever they may be, that they know not what they say,” he states. Later on, he adds:

  To attain to eminence in letters costs a man time, watching, hunger, nakedness, headaches, indigestions, and other things of the sort. . . . But for a man to come in the ordinary course of things to be a good soldier costs him all the student suffers, and in an incomparably higher degree, for at every step he runs the risk of losing his life. For what dread of want or poverty that can reach or harass the student can compare with what the soldier feels, who finds himself beleaguered in some stronghold mounting guard in some ravelin or cavalier, knows that the enemy is pushing a mine towards the post where he is stationed, and cannot under any circumstances retire or fly from the imminent danger that threatens him?

  In other words, only reluctantly did the most enduring Spanish writer of all time perceive himself as a writer. He probably would have liked to be remembered for his patriotic participation (“the greatest day in history”) in Spain’s glorious defeat of the Ottomans.

  The meager sampling of documents related to Cervantes’s life doesn’t offer many clues about his looks. No portraits survive, which, again, hasn’t stopped people from picturing him in vivid terms. In the collective imagination, the author of El Quijote is of average height, slim, and bearded. These qualities are connected to a narrative self-portrait in the prologue to his Exemplary Novellas. Nowhere else in his oeuvre is he as candid as he is in this paragraph. He starts by dreaming that the most famous Spanish portraitist of the time, Juan de Jáuregui y Aguilar, had agreed to do his portrait. Then he proceeds to describe his own face. The following quote, rendered into English
by Walter K. Kelly in 1952, is from that preface:

  This person whom you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, & silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden, large moustaches, a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other, a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very light-footed.

  The reference to his dental condition is intriguing. Some find in it evidence that the knight-errant is Cervantes’s alter ego, since early on in Don Quixote’s exploits (First Part, chapter XVIII) he loses some of his teeth in a fight. Soon thereafter, in an exchange with Sancho in which the pair counts the number of lost teeth, the knight-errant says that “never in my life have I had tooth or grinder drawn, nor has any fallen out or been destroyed by any decay or rheum.”

  THIS “LIKENESS” OF CERVANTES, as presented in Exemplary Novellas, is important because, in the pictorial representations that have been created of the two over time, Cervantes is indeed made to look like Don Quixote and vice versa: they are, in some way, doppelgängers. Needless to say, in a narrative where doubles play an important role, this is no coincidence. In the First Part, chapter I, the knight-errant is described thus: “The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman.” Cervantes was pushing fifty-eight when the First Part was released, and given his past military adventures, it is easy to imagine him a hardy, early-rising sportsman.

  Juan de Jáuregui y Aguilar never produced a portrait of Cervantes, though two forgeries were initially attributed to him. The first one says “Cervantes c. 1600.” The second was owned for years by Marqués viudo de Casa Torres. The first portrait of the author, a rather stilted one, depicts him with his mouth closed (i.e., hiding his denture), as is usual in the images of those days, and appeared in the front matter of the French translation of Exemplary Novellas, published as Nouvelles de Michel de Cervantes in 1705, approximately ninety years after the author’s death. The anonymous lithograph presents him sitting at his desk, with a pile of books on the floor. An angelic child floating in the background, an inspiration of genius, offers him a pen, which he intends to hold with his right hand. Cervantes wears a mustache and beard and is dressed in Renaissance attire. But his facial features are dull.

  Cervantes (c. 1600), attributed to Juan de Jauregui y Aguilar.

  Is this what he looked like? Was his demeanor that of a valiant caballero? A more focused portrayal was produced in 1738 at the London printer J. and R. Tonson, under the auspices of Baron de Carteret. The face has a suspiciously Shakespearean look. Again, Cervantes is sitting at his desk, the right hand writing with a feathered pen, the left hand hidden. Behind him is a small theatrical window in which a knight—it might be Don Quixote himself—makes an appearance. The identity of the artist remains a mystery.

  Portrait of Cervantes (1768), engraved by Jacob Folkema.

  These two images have been reproduced multiple times throughout the centuries, defining the way we imagine Cervantes. Another engraving, this one done by an artist known as Hulett in London in 1742, portrays Cervantes as a mestizo. This may have to do with the fact that Spain, in the eyes of eighteenth-century England, was an awkward, semi-barbaric country close to Africa (known originally as Barbary). But it also prompts the question, to what extent is it accurate to visualize Cervantes through a Caucasian prism? Given the discussion that has taken place over several centuries of his having Jewish blood, and based on his intense interest in things Muslim in his oeuvre, it is possible that the novelist wasn’t white. Curiously, there is another portrait by Achille Devéria, done in Paris in 1825, that portrays Cervantes as black.

  As mentioned before, Spain in the late sixteenth century was awash in ethnic hullabaloo. La Convivencia, a term referring to the cohabitation in the Iberian Peninsula of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, was coming to an end in 1492, the year of the Reconquista, during which the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella attempted to unify Spain under a single faith. First they expelled the Jews and then, later the same year, the Arabs. But the previous centuries of cohabitation, brought on by the fall of the Roman Empire and the dissemination of its population across Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, and northern Africa, produced a society marked by racial cross-fertilization, despite the religious tensions and even violence that defined the period.

  Portrait of Cervantes (1868), artist unknown.

  There is an 1868 portrait, released by the publisher J. B. Lippincott in Philadelphia, its artist unknown, that emphasizes the histrionic, as if Cervantes belonged to a theater troupe. One engraving by C. A. Leslie and Danforth of 1876, published by Porter and Coates, also in Philadelphia, makes him look almost uncomfortable, as if disdaining the attention granted to him. And an oil painting by C. A. Machado, done around 1900, in which Cervantes is holding El Quijote with his maimed left arm and has a feather pen in his right hand, casts him in stately terms. Among my favorite portraits of Cervantes is the first pictorial interpretation commissioned by the Real Academia Española (RAE), the federally funded institution in Madrid charged with safeguarding Spain’s cultural heritage. This portrait, by J. del Castillo and Salvador Carmona, based on an image falsely attributed to Alonso del Arco, might be the one most frequently reprinted inside Spain. It was used as the frontispiece in the official RAE edition of Don Quijote de la Mancha released in 1780. It presents Cervantes as a bearded, fashionable twentieth-century intellectual. The commission came at a time when the Spanish government started to look at Cervantes as an author who could represent the nation’s patrimony. (More on this in chapter 6, “Quijotismo and Menardismo.”) That RAE edition, by the way, also includes an engraving featuring Don Quixote and Aldonza Lorenzo surrounded by an assortment of characters and motifs, from an African slave to a castle, a lion, and a bonfire of burning books, while an angel descends from heaven with a laurel in hand. Behind all of them is a pedestal in which the title of Cervantes’s novel is proudly displayed—Quixote spelled with an x, not a j.

  A counterfeited portrait attributed to Diego Velázquez, known as Velazquez pinx. Dessiné e gravé par Bouvier. Cervantè d’après le tableu original du Cabinet de M. Brière, appeared in Geneva in 1825. Born in 1599, Velázquez, the baroque court artist, was Cervantes’s junior by more than fifty years. When the First Part of El Quijote was released, Velázquez was six years old. There is no record of the two having met.

  Cervantes (1825), by Charles Bouvier, falsely attributed to Diego Velázquez.

  This isn’t the only Cervantes portrait falsely attributed to a famous Spanish artist. There are images purportedly painted by El Greco, who was indeed Cervantes’s contemporary. Born in Crete, then part of the Republic of Venice, El Greco lived some of his life in Toledo, about forty-five miles from Madrid, where Cervantes died. Another portrait was supposedly made by El Greco’s son, Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli.

  All these images make Cervantes look like Don Quixote, who, in the First Part, chapter I, is described as “one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.” The number of Don Quixote look-alikes and forgeries emphasizes where Cervantes is situated in the Spanish imagination. Fiction begets reality, not the other way around. He is the national author par excellence, whose oeuvre represents the country’s idealism as well as its humor.

  None of the portraits ever depict Cervantes as anything but an adult. Nor do they present him as a soldier in Lepanto. Or as a captive in Algiers. Instead, they represent a scrapbook of knights. But did Cervantes imagine himself as his knight-errant?

  Other sources offer us a hint of how Cervantes perceived himself. In his preface to El Quijote, Cervantes describes himself as the owner of a “sterile, ill-tilled wit.” (He might have pr
eferred the other epithet awarded him by critics: el genio lego, the ignorant genius.) Early in the novel (First Part, chapter VI), we get another perspective when the protagonist, Alonso Quijano, by then already known as Don Quixote, has his personal library inspected by two village censors and the hidalgo’s good friends, the priest and the barber. While browsing through the titles, the barber comes across Cervantes’s La Galatea, which he mentions to the priest. In turn, the priest replies:

  “That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but brings nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of grace that is now denied it; and in the mean time do you, senor gossip, keep it shut up in your own quarters.”

  Also in the preface, Cervantes opts to portray himself not as Don Quixote’s double, or even as his sibling, but as his father—or better, as his stepfather. He writes in the preface to the First Part: