The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet (6 page)

 

 

We continued our pleasant conversation in the garden until late into the afternoon, and took advantage of this opportunity to observe Lope de Vega close to. I had met him once on the steps of San Felipe, when I was a young lad newly arrived in Madrid, and he had placed his hand on my head, almost as if in an act of confirmation. I imagine it must be difficult now to grasp just what an important figure the great Lope was in those days. He must have been about sixty-four then, and he still had a very gallant air about him, enhanced as it was by his elegant gray locks and his trim mustache and beard, which he continued to wear despite his clerical habit. He was a discreet man who spoke little, smiled a great deal, and sought to please everyone, and who concealed behind impeccable courtesy his pride at having reached such an enviable position. No one—apart from Calderón—enjoyed such fame in his lifetime, writing plays of a beauty, variety, and richness that were unequaled in Europe. He had been a soldier in his youth, seen action in a naval battle in the Azores, in Aragon, and in the war against England, and at the time of which I am speaking, he had written a good part of the more than one thousand five hundred plays and four hundred sacramental dramas that flowed from his pen. His status as a priest did not prevent him enjoying a long and scandalous life full of amorous intrigues, lovers, and illegitimate children, all of which meant, understandably enough, that despite his great literary reputation, he was never seen as a particularly virtuous man and so received none of the courtly benefits to which he aspired, such as the post of royal chronicler, which he always sought but never attained. Otherwise, he enjoyed both fame and fortune. And unlike good don Miguel de Cervantes, who died, as I said, poor, alone, and forgotten, Lope’s funeral, nine years after the dates that concern us here, was a multitudinous display of homage such as had never before been seen in Spain. As for the basis for his reputation, much has been written about that, and I commend those books to the reader. I later had occasion to travel to England and learn the English tongue. I read and even saw performances of plays by William Shakespeare, and I would say that although the Englishman could plumb the depths of the human heart, and while his characters are perhaps more complex than Lope’s, the Spaniard’s sheer theatrical skill, inventiveness, and ability to keep an audience on tenterhooks, the brilliance of his intrigues and the captivating way in which each plot evolves are all incomparable. And even when it comes to characters, I’m not sure that the Englishman always succeeded in depicting the doubts and anxieties of lovers, or the crafty machinations of servants as ingeniously as Lope. Consider, if you will, his little-known work
The Duke of Viseu
and tell me if that tragic play is not the equal of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Moreover, if it is true that Shakespeare’s plays were in some way so universal that we can all recognize ourselves in them—only
Don Quixote
is as Spanish as Lope and as universal as Shakespeare—it is no less true that Lope, with his new approach to drama, held up a very faithful mirror to the Spain of our century, and that his plays were imitated everywhere, thanks to the fact that Spanish, then, was a language that bestrode two worlds, a language admired, read, and spoken by everyone. However, it must be said, too, that this was due in no small measure to the fact that it was also the language of our fearsome troops and our arrogant, black-clad ambassadors. Unlike other nations—and in this I happily include that of Shakespeare—only Spain has left such a clear record of its customs, values, and language, and all thanks to the plays of Lope, Calderón, Tirso, Rojas, Alarcón, and their ilk, which made such a lasting impression on the theaters of the world. At a time when Spanish was being spoken in Italy, Flanders, the Indies, and the remote seas of the Philippines, the Frenchman Corneille was imitating the work of Guillén de Castro in order to find success in his own land, and the land of Shakespeare was home only to a bunch of hypocritical pirates in search of excuses to prosper and, like so many others, nipping at the heels of the weary, old Spanish lion, who was, nonetheless, still capable of far greater things than they ever were. To quote Lope:

During that conversation in the garden, we spoke about a little of everything. Captain Contreras brought news of various wars, and Lopito described to Diego Alatriste the current situation in the Mediterranean, where my master had once sailed and done battle. Then, inevitably, talk turned to literature. Luis Alberto de Prado read some of his own verse, which, to his great pleasure, drew praise from Quevedo, and Góngora’s name was mentioned again.

“Apparently, the man’s dying,” Contreras told them.

“Good riddance,” said Quevedo tartly, “there’ll be plenty to replace him. Every day, eager for fame, as many overcultivated, turd-mongering poets spring up in Spain as mushrooms in the winter damp.”

Lope smiled from his Olympian heights, amused and tolerant. He could not bear Góngora either, although, paradoxically, he had also always hoped to draw him into his circle, because, deep down, he admired and feared him, so much so that he even wrote these lines:

Góngora—that prebendary-cum-swan—was, however, the kind of man who ate alone and never succumbed to blandishments. At first, he had dreamed of snatching the poetic scepter from Lope, even writing plays, but he failed in that as he did in so many things. For all these reasons, Lope always professed to loathe him, meanwhile mocking his own relative lack of knowledge of the classics—for unlike Góngora and Quevedo, Lope knew no Greek and could barely read Latin—as well as the success of his plays with ordinary people. Of his plays he wrote:

Lope, however, rarely stepped into the public arena. He did his best to get along well with everyone, and at that point in his life and his success, he was in no mood to become embroiled in disputes and rivalries. He contented himself instead with gentle, veiled attacks and left the really dirty work to his friends, Quevedo among them, for the latter had no qualms about pouring scorn on Góngora’s
culturanista
excesses or, indeed, on those of his followers. Góngora could no longer hit back at the fearsome Quevedo, who was a past master when it came to tongue-lashings.

“I read
Don Quixote
when I was in Sicily,” remarked Captain Contreras. “Not bad at all, I thought.”

“Indeed,” replied Quevedo. “It’s already famous and will, I’m sure, outlive many other works.”

Lope raised a disdainful eyebrow, poured himself more wine, and changed the subject. This is further evidence, as I say, that in that Spain of never-ending envy and back-stabbing, where a place on Parnassus was as sought-after as Inca gold, the pen caused more blood to be shed than the sword; besides, enemies in one’s own profession are always the worst kind. The animosity between Lope and Cervantes—the latter, as I said, had, by then, entered the heaven reserved for just men and was doubtless seated at the right hand of God—had gone on for years and was still alive even after poor don Miguel’s death. The initial friendship between those two giants of Spanish literature quickly turned to hatred when the illustrious one-armed Cervantes, whose plays, like Góngora’s, met with utter failure—“I could,” he wrote, “find no one who wanted them”—fired the first shot, by including in Part One of his novel a caustic comment on Lope’s work, in particular his famous parody of the flocks of sheep. Lope responded with these rough words: “I will say nothing of poets, for this is a good century for them. But there is none so bad as Cervantes and none so foolish as to praise
Don Quixote
.” At the time, the novel was considered to be a minor art requiring little intellect and fit only to entertain young ladies; the theater brought money, but poetry brought luster and glory. This is why Lope respected Quevedo, feared Góngora, and despised Cervantes:

. . . as he wrote in a letter, which, to rub salt in the wound, he sent to his rival without paying the one-
real
postage. Cervantes would write later: “What bothered me most was having to pay that one
real
.” And so poor don Miguel was driven out of the theater, ground down by work, poverty, and prison, by a succession of humiliations and by many pointless hours spent waiting in anterooms, quite unaware that immortality was already riding toward him on the back of Rocinante. He, who never sought favors by shamelessly flattering the powerful, as Góngora, Quevedo, and Lope all did, finally accepted the illusion of his own failure, and, as honest as ever, wrote:

But then, that was the nature of the lost world I am describing to you, when the mere name of Spain made the earth tremble. It was all barbed quarrels, arrogance, ill will, cruelty, and poverty. As the empire on which the sun was setting was gradually crumbling, as we were being erased from the face of the earth by our misfortune and our own vile deeds, there, amongst the rubble and the ruins, lies the mark left by those remarkably talented men who, while they could not justify it, could at least explain that age of greatness and glory. They were the children of their time in the evil that they did—and they did a great deal—but they were also the children of the genius of their time in the brilliant works they wrote—and they wrote so much. No nation has given birth to so many men of genius at any one time, nor have the writers of any one nation recorded as faithfully as they did the tiniest details of their age. Fortunately, they live on in libraries, in the pages of their books, within reach of whoever cares to approach and listen, astonished, to the heroic, terrifying roar of our century and our lives. Only thus is it possible to understand what we were and what we are. And then may the devil take us all.

 

 

 

 

Lope remained at his house, the secretary Prado left, and the rest of us, including Lopito, finished the evening in Juan Lepre’s tavern, on the corner of Calle del Lobo and Calle de las Huertas, sharing a skin of Lucena wine. The talk grew animated. Captain don Alonso de Contreras, an extremely likable fellow, who enjoyed a good fight and good conversation, recounted tales of his life as a soldier and that of my master, including that business in Naples in the fifteenth year of this century, when, after my master had killed a man in a duel over a woman, it was Captain Contreras himself who helped him to elude justice and return to Spain.

“The lady didn’t escape unscathed, either,” he added, laughing. “Diego left her with a charming scar on her cheek as a souvenir. And by God, the hussy deserved it—and more.”

“Oh, I know many such women who do,” added Quevedo, ever the misogynist.

And on this theme, he regaled us with some lines that he had thought up there and then:

I looked at my master, incapable of imagining him slashing a woman’s face with a knife. He, however, remained impassive, elbows on the table, as he stared into his mug of wine. Don Franciso caught my look, cast a sideways glance at Alatriste, and said no more. What other things, I wondered, lay behind those silences. And I shuddered inside, as I always did when I got a glimpse of the captain’s dark inner life. It is never pleasant to grow in years and understanding and thus penetrate into the more hidden recesses of one’s hero’s mind and life, and, as I grew more perceptive with passing time, I saw things in Diego Alatriste that I would have preferred not to see.

“But then, of course,” said Contreras, who had also seen the expression on my face and feared perhaps that he had gone too far, “we were young and spirited. I remember one occasion, in Corfu it was . . .”

And he launched into another story. Along the way, he mentioned the names of various mutual friends, such as Diego, Duke of Estrada, a comrade of my master’s during the disastrous attack on the Kerkennah Islands, where they both nearly lost their lives trying to save that of Álvaro de la Marca, Count of Guadalmedina. The count, of course, had since exchanged his soldierly accoutrements for the post of confidant to Philip IV and, according to Quevedo, now accompanied the king each night on his romantic sorties. Forgetting my earlier gloomy thoughts, I listened to them talk, fascinated by their accounts of galleys and ships being boarded, of slaves and booty. The way Captain Contreras told them, these events took on fabulous proportions: the famous incident when, with the Marquis of Santa Cruz, they set fire to the Berber fleet off La Goleta; the description of idyllic places at the very foot of Mount Vesuvius; the youthful orgies and acts of bravado, when Contreras and my master would spend in a matter of days the money they had earned from pursuing pirates around the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Between swigs of the wine we were clumsily spilling all over the table, Captain Contreras felt moved to recite some lines written in his honor by Lope de Vega and into which he now introduced my master’s name by way of a tribute: