by Sergio Pitol
A powerful and perhaps more troubling referent than the plot itself is represented by the distant, and for the majority of Spaniards, blurry, figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army enters Spain the day a dinner is held at the home of Pepilla González, where comedians and courtiers meet to work out the final details of the performance of Othello. No one in the course of the Episode knows for sure what Napoleon proposes upon entering Spain, and each person attempts to reconcile that enigma in the way that best suits their interests.
“Someone who performs or plays a role in theaters is commonly known as a comediante,” states the first edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. The comediante appears to be someone other than who he in fact is; his function is to portray someone else. One day he pretends to be the king, and the next day he is a laborer, saint, or ship’s captain. That ability to pretend, that ability to create ecstasy out of nothing—shipwrecks, love affairs, dethronements—tends sometimes to filter in a perverse way into the comediante’s personal life. Isidoro Máiquez, for example, during the rehearsals for Othello, becomes delirious; jealousy has overtaken him, fueled, among other reasons, by malicious anonymous letters informing him that he has been nothing but a whim to “his Duchess,” a common plaything of a refined lady who, incidentally, has replaced him with Don Juan de Mañara, a gentleman in his own right. In the drama’s final scene, Máiquez’s personality has vanished; he has been entirely transformed into a crazed Moor, a murderer. The version represented differs in some aspects from the original drama. The proof of Desdemona’s infidelity is found in an impassioned letter that she has supposedly written to her lover. An anonymous hand has forged her handwriting and signature. Faced with this evidence, Othello can no longer doubt her guilt. The letter seals the couple’s fate. Desdemona must inevitably die at the hands of the Moor. A letter in which Lesbia attempts to assuage Mañara’s jealousy has fallen into the hands of someone intent on punishing her. She reprimands him for daring to imagine that a woman of her stature might be interested in a ridiculous little comedian. Someone has removed the paper that Othello must read before the prostrate body of Desdemona, replacing it with the letter in which Lesbia ridicules him to reassure Juan de Mañara, and that same someone has replaced the stage dagger with a real knife. The Marquesa’s die is cast: she will die that night before her lover’s eyes, before those of her ferocious husband, and those of the very distinguished audience made up of the kingdom’s great nobility. Only Araceli’s timely intervention manages to avert the disaster.
Gabriel will discover from personal experience that the same functions of representation and the same to-and-fro between being and seeming that so unsettles comedians is repeated at Court, only there the reality of being gradually atrophies, while the function of seeming, of pretending, grows disproportionately larger. Court life requires a permanent ability to make believe. Its ceremonies become a never-ending performance that demands more complex dramatic talents and more stylized techniques than those required on the stage. One acts there not only in the performance of protocol, but also in the royal chambers, in the visits that the courtiers pay to each other in their respective palaces, in the theater, the bullfights, in walks in the countryside and, above all, in the passageways where they pretend to be who they are not, when they attend de ocultis the dinners of the fashionable comedians and bullfighters of the day, the popular dances and festivals, or even less desirable establishments where it was possible to rub elbows with the picaresque of every stripe that flourished in the slums of Madrid.
Living at the service of comedians or being a page in the palace precincts means participating in a perpetual representation, pretending to perform one activity when, in fact, one performs another. In the first chapter of The Court of Carlos IV, the young Araceli describes a heterogeneous list of duties that he must fulfill that constitutes in itself a delightful passage of local color. Among them, there are two that are mere affectation: “To walk out on the square of Santa Ana, pretending to look into the shops, but in reality listening with covert attention to what was being said in the knots that collected there of actors or dancers, and trying to discover what those of la Cruz theatre had to say against those of el Príncipe”; the other: “To call every day at the house of Isidoro Máiquez under pretext of asking him some question with reference to the dresses in the play; but, in reality, to ascertain whether a certain person happened to be with him—whose name I reserve for the present.” That is, to feign one interest when the real interest is another, a quite despicable one, I might add; to hear what is being said on the street only to repeat it later to a master; to ask something trivial about a garment when in fact the intention is to discover who is visiting whom, how those being observed carry themselves during the visit, what they talk about. They are of course the activities of an informant, a cop, a spy. Another mandatory activity was “to frequent the gallery of the theatre de la Cruz in order to hiss The Maidens’ Consent, a play that my mistress held in at least as much aversion as the others by the same author”—a provocative activity that complemented that of being a spy. The role of a page at court was very similar, exalted not only by the majesty of the settings and the rank of the protagonists but also by the cruelty of the measures the page must employ. The Countess Amaranta casts a spell over the callow Andalusian whom she invites to be her servant. She offers him the acquisition of a bright future as long as he becomes her slave. His astonishment will disappear within a few days, as soon as the Countess gives him his first instructions. To begin with, she will place him in another home from where he must inform her of everything that happens. Even if this arrangement shocks him, he will continue to be her page. Confident of the spell she exerts over the boy who was plucked from González’s home and carried off to the Escorial, Amaranta launches a far-reaching plan that will solve her problems forever. His role would consist of observing from behind tapestries or curtains, listening behind doors, winning the hearts of the handmaids of the ladies-in-waiting and of the ladies themselves, to obtain secrets of all kinds and become a major power in the Palace. By then, the Countess would secure for him letters patent of nobility; once titled, and with her help, he would enter the Royal Guard. Her power would become extraordinary: “A guardsman has indeed an advantage which princes themselves have not, for while these know nothing beyond the palace they live in—which is the reason why hardly any king governs well—the soldier is equally familiar with the palace and the street, the folks outside as well as those within; and this more general knowledge enables him to make himself useful to all parties and to pull the wires of a vast number of springs. A man who knows what he is about here is more powerful than all the potentates on earth; he can make his influence silently felt to the uttermost ends of the kingdom without its ever being suspected by those who give themselves such airs, calling themselves ministers and councilors.”
The fate assigned to Gabriel Araceli, that of becoming one of the future redeemers who would reclaim Spain, who have arisen from almost nothing—or, in his case, from absolutely nothing—prevents him from accepting the career of indignities proposed by the Countess. Again and again, he will place ahead of her and other members of the nobility the obligations that his honor and dignity require, even if at every turn he is met with hurtful and bitter comments in return. Honor and dignity are attributes characteristic of a gentleman, not of an insignificant louse who dares to claim them for himself. However, unwittingly and by chance, Gabriel will continue to find himself in situations that will allow him to hear terrible secrets, compromising not only for certain people but also for the affairs of the Crown; he will learn the contents of letters and messages that could cost very important persons their life and liberty; he will witness scenes concerning the security of the kingdom. It goes without saying that Galdós will not allow his creation to obtain any personal benefit from such secrets.
Many of Gabriel’s duties in service to Pepita González were, not surprisingly, closely related to the theater.
One, already mentioned, was to campaign against The Maidens’ Consent; another, “to accompany her to the theatre, where it was my part to hold the sceptre and crown till she came off after the second scene of the second act in The False Czar of Muscovy to reappear transformed into a queen, to the utter confusion of Orloff and the magnates who had supposed her to be an itinerant tart-seller.” It was also his duty “every afternoon to take a pot of leftover stew, crusts of bread, and other scraps of food to Don Luciano Francisco Comella, a dramatist whose plays until recently had been much celebrated, who was always starving in a house on the Calle de la Berenjena, with his hunchback daughter, who helped him in his dramatic work.” Galdós digresses at every turn on theatrical topics, sometimes insignificant, others of greater importance, such as the battle waged by the neoclassicists against the verbal diarrhea and tacky scenery of the theater of the time, a trend led precisely by Comella, the author, among other rubbish, of All Lost in a Day for a Mad and Blind Love and The False Czar of Muscovy, which had earned Pepita standing ovations in the past. This astracanada theater felt threatened by the loathsome dramatic unities postulated by an equally loathsome Moratín. But let us return to the first question: why begin the history of the palace conspiracy with the premiere of The Maidens’ Consent, which took place two years before?
Miguel de Cervantes scatters throughout the Quixote a wide range of authors’ names and book titles. This reference is not intended to boast of the author’s culture. These cultural references are there because they play a decisive role in the narrative structure: they support the protagonist’s motives and the mad ideas; they determine the profile of other characters; and they allow stylized mirror games, such as comparing a work in progress: the very history of the hidalgo of La Mancha, to its fake derivations, such as Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quixote. Playing with other books infuses a new style into the art of storytelling and demonstrates the relationship of the novel with the Renaissance culture that surrounds it. Cervantes’s eagerness to intertextualize had few successors in Spanish narrative. Galdós is one of the few writers in our language who employed and renewed this device. The war Luciano Comella and his followers wage against Fernández de Moratín is without a doubt the transplantation of a struggle between the old and the new that is beginning to insinuate itself in Spain. The brutal struggle between playwrights is a kind of first call in the debate between a stagnant and incoherent culture and the effort to establish the order and the task of tidying up in every corner of the kingdom. The fact that Moratín’s work deals with the education of society, and women in particular, appears as a response to that frenzied court where the majority of its members are not educated at all, and where the only roads available to arrive at a goal are pretense and intrigue. That exercise of intertextuality may precede the same diegesis of the Episodes. The device allows Galdós to avoid sinking into long didactic explanations, the very kind that renders so many of his contemporaries’ works unreadable. By listing Pepilla González’s readings, her omissions and literary shortcomings, Galdós is able to provide us, for example, with perfect subtlety, the image of her person, more powerfully than would have been possible in a store of pages that contain an infinite number of details about her habits, virtues, and weaknesses. Gabriel Araceli comments—and here we sense again the voice of the former narrator, not that of the page, who could scarcely translate his feelings in such a learned way—that the actress was not known for her good literary taste, among other reasons because whoever approached her always had Ovid and Boccaccio in mind rather than Aristotle. A remarkable way of saying everything, without going into details.
Ortega y Gasset points out in his essay on Goya how decisive the popular veneer was for Spanish culture in the eighteenth century: “In the second half of that century the masses were housed in life forms of their own invention, with an enthusiasm aware of itself and with ineffable delight, without looking sideways at the aristocratic customs in anxious flight toward them. Meanwhile, the upper classes were only happy when they abandoned their own ways, and they became saturated with plebeianism.”
Regarding that plebeianism alluded to by Ortega, Carmen Martín Gaite, in Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain, studied the changes that took places in Spanish society at the end of the eighteenth century due to the introduction into court life of traditions and customs viewed until then with contempt by people of higher rank. Martín Gaite amply illustrates this desire for debasement to which Ortega alluded. We are introduced to a world in which ladies and gentlemen competed to speak, dress, and behave like their maids or footmen, with the relaxation of customs that this implied. Jean-François de Bourgoing, a French traveler in Spain, writes: “There are, among both sexes, persons of distinguished rank, who seek their models among the heroes of the populace, who imitate their dress, manners, and accent, and are flattered when it is said of them, ‘He is very like a majo.’ — ‘One would take her for a maja.’”14 And other authors of the time lament that “ladies and even the señoras of the highest birth, have been transformed into so many other majas in their dress, their conversation, and their manners as to be indistinguishable from that despicable class of people […] and they have reached such a point in the degradation of their respective graces, lordships, and excellencies that when they have a cigar in their mouths they resemble even more the most vulgar women of this low caste […]. In general, all those fops eager to practice their majismo, to be seen on the Pradera de San Isidro, and learn from their footmen the jota, the guaracha, the bolero, in short, their songs and dances, boasted of courting an actress.” Another traveler picks up on the rumors that were spreading through Madrid about the Duchess of Alba, advanced in her desire for unprejudiced modernity: “Several years past,” they say, “she had already put aside any appearance of dignity to the point of going out in search of adventure in the public squares, her lack of scruples reaching such a degree that she even counted toreros among her lovers. At midnight, they would gather in the middle of the Prado to have a tertulia and play music.”
The plebeianization of the aristocracy covers an unfilled spiritual space. It was a means of escape from the ailing morality in use; perhaps also a vital response to the apparent backwardness before an enlightened Europe, and, above all, before the greatness of a lost past. That taste for popular customs and expressions becomes the Hispanic embodiment of Volksgeist (the spirit of the people) celebrated by the German Romantics and disseminated at a rapid pace across the rest of Europe. The greatest exponent of that popular spirit in Spanish art was Francisco de Goya. It could be said that if the Volksgeist produced an immense figure in the art of Europe, it was precisely that of Goya. The Spanish artist painted the populace in a thousand ways, as mere ornamentation, with an almost Arcadian tone, in the tapestries for the Royal Palace, as a collective hero in The Second of May 1808, as a tragic character in The Third of May 1808, as a demonic protagonist in many of his witches’ covens, as maker of a thousand disasters in his etchings, and as magnificent representative of the absurd in an extraordinary painting, the absurdity of absurdities, carnival itself—Bakhtin in the raw!—which is that small glory called Burial of the Sardine.
The aristocracy assumed majismo in an absolutely theatrical way; pretending to be what it was not, making daily rituals a form of spectacle. Living in the theater and dramatizing life to the unthinkable. For many of the characters in The Court of Carlos IV, the descent among the rabble is like taking the waters: a powerful source of life. Among them, the Queen María Luisa, no less! And the Duchess Lesbia and Don Juan de Mañara and, on a smaller scale and more in the past, the Countess Amaranta.
If Galdós lingers on Moratín’s The Maidens’ Consent, it is not due to any special appreciation for his prescripts, which he never accepted, but to moral imperatives. For the young liberal writer who undertakes in 1873 the task of fictionalizing a century and a half of Spanish history, that is, after the Prim Revolution and on the eve of the First Republic, educating Spain marks the beginning of
regeneration; once placed in this terrain, the education of women seems essential to the efficient running of the country he believed to be on the horizon. The Maidens’ Consent was one of the first calls to educate young women and a warning against the education in convents, where pretending was considered an ideal standard of social co-existence. Moreover, the implementation of a neoclassical theater with its unities of place, time, and action suddenly made the theater of Luciano Comella obsolete with all its disparate theatrical effects, its booming titles, its historical improbability, and its cheap sentimentality. The collapse of this false, ludicrous ostentation and the return of dignity to theatrical language must have seemed to Galdós like signs that were already pointing to the mature and industrious Spain that he desired.
In fact, this new theater that excited a handful of spectators and terrorized the old guard had a short life in Spain. Alfonso Reyes reminds us that Spanish humanism has always distinguished itself because of its aversion to a strict adherence to convention. Therefore, no great work of art in Spain has been born of narrow precepts. Galdós himself, however much sympathy he might have felt for Moratín and his didactic theater, places in the mouth of Araceli, in passing, a comment that to us seems like an unrepressed sigh of relief. Once again, the speaker is not the young page who was the protagonist of the story but the old Don Gabriel de Araceli who, recalling Moratín’s importance during his time, wrote: “No one could deny him the honor of having revived the true spirit of Spanish comedy, and The Young Maidens’ Consent has always seemed to me a work of great genius in spite of the part I took at the first performance of that play—as the reader may remember,” concluding, “He died in 1828, but his letters and papers reveal no trace of his having known the works of Byron, Goethe, or Schiller; he went to his grave believing in Goldoni as the greatest poet of his day.” A superb way to dot the i’s and cross the t’s because, until recently, the stature attributed to the Venetian playwright in Spain was more or less the same as that enjoyed by the brothers Álvarez Quintero.