XVII
The Picaro Follow The Conquistador
Students of the Literature of Spain's Golden Age are familiar with a curious parallelism in the circumstances associated with the writers and the production of the two greatest novels of the period, Don Quijote de la Mancha of Miguel de Cervantes and Guzmán de Alfarache of Mateo Alemán. Despite the coolness which apparently characterized their personal relations[1] there are striking similarities in the conditions affecting the literary careers and masterpieces of the two novelists. Both men found life a constant struggle against poverty and eked out a precarious living from poorly compensated government posts; both served terms in debtor's prisons, where their greatest works may have been conceived if not actually written in part; both found little happiness in domestic life; both derived much fame but little fortune from the popularity of their chief works; both received the compliment of a spurious sequel of their masterpieces by pseudonymous emulators and were thus spurred to bring forth authentic second parts of their respective novels; and both sought opportunities to better their lot in the Spanish Indies, though only Alemán actually crossed the ocean to the viceroyalty of New Spain, where he died in obscurity. A further, and less generally appreciated, aspect of this parallelism is the spontaneous and enduring acclaim accorded both famous novels in the overseas possessions of Spain in America. If, as will presently appear, the greater part and quite probably the entire first edition of the Quijote was shipped to the New World in 1605, Guzmán de Alfarache, from 1600 on, appears to have reached those distant shores in even greater quantities and to have enjoyed, particularly during the years imme-
diately after its first publication, even greater sales in the Indies than did Cervantes' masterpiece. Throughout the remainder of the colonial period these two great novels retained a reading public probably exceeding that of any other work of prose fiction.
In a measure, Alemán shares with Cervantes the distinction, if that is the proper term, of destroying the obviously waning popularity of the literature that had done so much to stimulate the Conquistador and his immediate successors, for the pícaro, or rogue, was, as a modern writer aptly puts it, "a sort of Amadís de Gaula upside down, an antihero."[2] The chief protagonist of picaresque fiction was devoid of idealism and predisposed to a somewhat cynical parasitism which he much preferred to any honest toil. He accepted stoically and without illusions the grim reality of existence, and by trickery and petty thieving he extracted a precarious living from the society in which he found himself. "His most lofty aspiration is to get enough to eat ..." and "he reveres not his king and lady, but his stomach." The pícaro was, indeed, the very reverse of the chivalrous knight, and virtually the only trait that these contrasting fictional characters had in common was a restless desire to move about the world, driven on by some subconscious urge. The episodic, loosely knit plot of the idealistic tales is repeated in the sardonic recital of the adventures of shrewd and heartless rogues who crudely reveal the foibles and hypocrisies of the society through which they roved. As the novels of chivalry portrayed and glorified an unreal world, the picaresque narratives, usually told in the first person, dwelt on the ugly and the sordid and, by satirical exaggeration, presented a caricature of contemporary life. The earlier Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) had set the pattern, later so widely imitated in Spanish and European letters, but it was Mateo Alemán's masterpiece at the end of the century which clearly defined the new novel form and first used the term pícaro in identifying this literary type. His work was, indeed, a sort of parody of the chivalric fiction with which the more sophisticated readers were already surfeited.
Guzmán de Alfarache's birth, like that of most pícaros, was slightly irregular and not of a character to reflect great credit either upon himself or upon his parents. His father was a Genoese merchant who established himself in Seville and contracted a union
with the young widow of an elderly gentleman. At the age of fifteen the orphan Guzmán was obliged to seek a living and launched upon what proved to be a notably shady career in the highways and byways of Spain and Italy. His first adventures took place in country inns where he experienced firsthand the wiles practiced by their proprietors on unwary customers, particularly in the disguised dishes they served. An alleged omelet, which might more properly be called an "egg poultice," made the unhappy lad violently ill. A friendly muleteer later gave him a lift and the two, together with a couple of friars, put up at another roadside tavern. Quite by accident, while searching for his missing cloak, Guzmán detected the innkeeper's attempt to pass off some mule flesh as veal, and the ensuing melee was broken up by the police.
After more encounters on the road, interrupted by long moral disquisitions and intercalated stories—the latter technique was similarly employed by Cervantes in the first part of his Don Quixote —Alemán brings his pícaro to Madrid where Guzmán soon acquired the manifold vices of the low life of that city. His associates were beggars and gamblers from whom he learned an extensive repertoire of frauds and card tricks. As a scullion in the household of a nobleman, he found among his fellow servants a ready outlet for his passion for gambling, and to recoup his heavy losses he mastered a facile knack of pilfering small articles about the house and of deceiving the cook in various ways. Disaster inevitably overtook him and he lost his position. A trusting apothecary commissioned Guzmán to deliver a quantity of silver to a merchant and with this booty the now conscienceless rogue made his way to Toledo as a well-dressed young man. At the Cathedral he struck up an acquaintance with a very attractive lady who invited him home to supper. Elated at his conquest, Guzmán ordered a sumptuous meal at his own expense, but the sudden arrival of an alleged brother forced him to witness the enjoyment of the banquet by the scheming pair from the concealment of an inverted bath. Guzmán then found it expedient to depart hastily from Toledo, and he decided to enlist in a company of soldiers bound for Genoa where he planned to look up his father's relatives. After further misadventures he reached the Italian city, though in rags and badly down on his luck. The family of his sire had no desire to accept their vagrant kinsman and
had him tossed in a blanket by four evil spirits who allegedly haunted the chamber in which he was lodged.
From Genoa Guzmán moved on to Rome where he became a member of the highly lucrative guild of beggars which had reduced alms-seeking to both a science and a fine art. It had perfected methods of simulating the most dread diseases and bodily malformations which infallibly evoked the pity of passers-by, particularly in the vicinity of church entrances, and the professional mendicants thus derived substantial incomes. Guzmán had the good fortune to attract the attention of a very compassionate Cardinal of the church who took him home and summoned the most famous surgeons of the Eternal City to treat the pícaro's apparently diseased leg. The rogue revealed his fraud to the physicians but prevailed upon them to enter into a combination with him by which they could collect high fees from the kindly church official. Though the cure thus arranged proved long and costly to the Cardinal, his delight on Guzmán's complete recovery after several months moved him to take the young charlatan into his domestic service as a page. The light-fingered proclivities and the passion for gambling of the misguided youth eventually brought about his undoing, and the long-suffering Cardinal dismissed him from his household. And thus Guzmán passed from one employment to another and, in the course of the sequel to this long novel, he traveled from city to city of Italy. Finally, after numerous misadventures, he returned to Spain where the knaveries of this consummate rogue at length earned him a harsh sentence of servitude in the royal galleys. This severe penalty at last brought repentance and, on his aiding the authorities in the discovery of a mutiny, the picaresque tale closes with a promise to grant this antithesis of Amadis of Gaul his freedom.
Such in brief is the narrative, interlarded with much extraneous material, which attained a popularity on both sides of the Atlantic rivaling that of the earlier romances of chivalry. So enthusiastic was the reception accorded Mateo Alemán's work that over twenty editions appeared within a few years, and it was promptly translated into various languages. This leisurely tale of the seamy side of life, written in a simple, natural style, seems grossly tedious today, and it is a little hard to comprehend the ardor of the book-buying public of the time for its pessimistic reflections of life, its lengthy phi-
losophizing, and its interminable interruptions in the form of intercalated stories. It may be because of the modifications which its predecessor, Lazarillo de Tormes, had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, that Alemán found it expedient to freight El pícaro, as the novel was popularly called,[3] so heavily with moral platitudes and wearying disquisitions. Possibly the readers liked these didactic passages, but it is more likely that they realized that the author had necessarily written with one eye on the Holy Office, and therefore they patiently endured these digressions for the sake of the genuine entertainment that they derived from the pícaro's adventures, somewhat as a modern radio audience submits with relative passivity to the saccharine and mellifluous "commercials" of broadcasted programs. But, whatever difficulty the twentieth-century reader may encounter in relishing the prolix account of Guzmán de Alfarache's adventures, the book shipments of the first decade of the seventeenth century and long after give ample testimony to the warm welcome bestowed upon this literary creation in the contemporary New World.
Though the first edition of Don Quixote reached the Spanish Indies in the year of its publication, as will appear in the next chapter, there is no available evidence that El pícaro arrived so soon after leaving the press. This delay may be explained by the fact that the ship manifests of 1599 survive in an exceedingly fragmentary state, though they are hardly worse than those of other years. A better explanation, perhaps, is that the first editions of that year came off the presses too late to catch the annual fleets leaving in the late spring or early summer.
But if El pícaro missed the boat in 1599, much evidence is at hand to suggest that this delay was compensated for by the large number of copies shipped the year following. Scarcely a manifest of 1600 covering consignments of books fails to include "Libros del pícaro " in lots of a dozen, a score, or a hundred and more, the majority of which went to Mexico City. Diego Mexía, a prominent dealer of Seville, dispatched nine copies to a certain Diego Navarro Maldonado and twenty-four others to Pablo de Ribera, the latter a bookseller of the viceregal capital. The largest single shipment noted was one by Don Diego Núñez Pérez, a councilman of Seville, to his brother in New Spain that same year on La Trinidad . This
consisted of three hundred copies of "Pícaros y por otro ne Guzmán de Alfarache," the sole item on the invoice and valued at 40,800 maravedís .[4] But, with only a fraction of the registros of 1600 still surviving, the exact or approximate number of copies of Alemán's masterpiece shipped to the New World that year can not be ascertained.
The current best seller was found in the deck cabins as well as in the holds of trans-Atlantic galleons, and there it helped to while away the tedium of the long voyage. On his arrival at Vera Cruz on October 23, 1600 a youthful passenger of the good ship Nuestra Señora de Aranzazu, Juan de Ugarte by name, a native of the Valley of Horozco in Vizcaya, submitted to the customary questioning of Inquisition officials who boarded each incoming ship before its freight, human and otherwise, was discharged. In reply to the query concerning books in his possession he reported that "to amuse himself he was bringing a book entitled La Arcadia of Lope de Vega and another, Guzmán de Alfarache ."[5] Another passenger aboard La Caridad also reported a copy of Alemán's work brought for the same purpose,[6] and an examination of the complete visita or inspection report would doubtless reveal many more copies thus transported that year.
Further proof of the exportation of volumes of El pícaro from Spain to its Indies seems hardly necessary, but meager data are available for succeeding years and offer added testimony. Though no single order in the existing records of 1601 included so large a quantity as the three-hundred lot shipped the year before by the Seville regidor Núñez Pérez, Guzmán de Alfarache is found in varying numbers on most book lists. One shipment of that year, accompanying a passenger bound for Puertobelo, totaled nearly ten thousand volumes, one hundred fourteen of which were copies of El pícaro .[7]
By 1603 "Libros del pícaro, parte segunda " began to appear on the registros . These were in all probability copies of the false continuation which a certain Juan José Martí, writing under the name of Mateo Luján de Sayavedra, brought forth in 1602, and this spurious sequel accompanies further copies of the Parte primera sent to the colonies. The incomplete records of the following years supply little additional detail but they justify the assumption that
substantial consignments of Guzmán de Alfarache, together with Alemán's subsequent Vida de San Antonio de Padua, and later the true Segunda parte de la vida del pícaro, continued to reach the Spanish Indies.
When in 1605 copies of Don Quijote began to make their appearance in the lists it might be supposed that the popularity of the picaresque novel was promptly eclipsed, but the evidence at hand does not suggest this. While enthusiastically welcoming the great work of Cervantes, colonial readers evinced no lessening of their appreciation of Guzmán de Alfarache, if the evidence of the ship manifests is accepted. Large as the initial consignments of Don Quijote were in the year of its first publication, the copies of Mateo Alemán's writings were even more numerous. On a registro of April 15, 1606, for example, it is recorded that a relative of the author, Juan Bautista del Rosso, who had had considerable financial participation in the publication of Guzmán de Alfarache, dispatched to Puertobelo three cases containing 292 copies of La vida de San Antonio de Padua; a little later he consigned 102 more copies of the same work to Cartagena de Indias in the galleons, while in the flota sailing for San Juan de Ulúa in New Spain he sent three cases containing 490 copies of the authentic Segunda parte del pícaro .[8]
That the Quijote gave the coup de grâce to the moribund novel of chivalry has long been accepted as an article of faith in literary history, but there is good reason to believe that the large shipments of Guzmán de Alfarache, as already suggested, had done much to wean colonial readers from the type of literature which Cervantes burlesqued. Even in the last decade of the sixteenth century there are indications in the shipping lists of a decline in interest in the fantastic tales which had so long entertained readers on both sides of the Atlantic, but after 1600 there is a pronounced falling off in the number of chivalric works among fiction books shipped. When Don Quijote began to accompany Guzmán de Alfarache to the New World these two heroes quickly vanquished Amadís and Palmerín as well as their innumerable descendants.
In successive years the fleets continued to bring further copies of Alemán's writings to supply the profitable colonial market, and
one of these annual armadas, that of 1608 composed of seventy vessels, brought the author himself to the viceroyalty of New Spain along with the great Mexican dramatist, Ruiz de Alarcón, though these two outstanding figures of the siglo de oro were not passengers on the same ship. Back in 1582 Alemán, then thirty-four years old, had taken steps preliminary to procuring passage to the New World, but he did not, for reasons unknown, complete arrangements.[9] Again in 1607 Alemán, now nearing sixty and his economic plight seemingly hopeless despite the extraordinary success of his novel, took the necessary measures to depart for New Spain where he might count on the favor and influence of a cousin, Dr. Alonso Alemán, a successful lawyer of Mexico City and a professor in the local university. This time the proper credentials were obtained for himself, three of his children, a niece and two servants, but the menacing activities of Dutch pirates moved the head of the Casa de Contratación at Seville to suspend the sailing of the fleet that year, thus obliging the impatient Alemán to postpone his departure until 1608.[10]
When the ships of this Flota dropped anchor at San Juan de Ulúa on August 19 of that year the representatives of the royal treasury and of the Holy Office presented themselves for the usual customs and inquisitional inspections. The decks and cabins were, apparently, examined with somewhat more than the ordinarily perfunctory care on this occasion. The author of El pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache had, seemingly, been entertaining himself on the ocean voyage with, or at least had in his possession, a copy of a recent work of his fellow craftsman, Miguel de Cervantes, entitled Don Quijote de la Mancha . Although this currently popular novel had been permitted to enter the viceroyalty of New Spain quite unmolested in the first year of its publication and later, for some unaccountable reason the inspector for the Holy Office saw fit in this instance to appropriate the distinguished traveler's copy and forward it to his inquisitorial superiors in Mexico City. Through the good offices of the Archbishop, however, it appears that Alemán soon recovered the confiscated volume, for on the report rendered by the overly zealous commissioner there is a marginal note stating that "the book was returned at the request of his Illustrious Rev-
erence, Don Francisco García Guerra, to its owner, Matheo Alemán, accountant and servitor of His Majesty."[11]
Concerning other incidents of this crossing of the Atlantic and the subsequent years in Mexico, little is known beyond the very meager data vouchsafed by the author of El pícaro himself in his later treatises on Castilian orthography and on the life of his benefactor, Archbishop García Guerra. The Ortografía castellana was published in Mexico City in 1609, while his last known publication, the Sucesos de don fray García Guerra, Arzobispo de México, appeared in 1613.[12] He was reported as still living in 1615, but the exact date of his death remains undetermined.[13]
If few of the documents shedding light on the annual shipments of Alemán's works to the colonies are now extant in Spain, records testifying to the actual circulation of his writings within the New World are even more scanty and fragmentary. Rarely are clear indications obtainable of the sale and distribution in the viceroyalties of the works of Spain's greatest creative writers, though the repeated shipments of such literature from Seville are indisputable. A small but illuminating scrap of evidence of the interest of colonial Peru in Alemán's best-known books is offered by a promissory note discovered among the notarial records preserved in the National Archive at Lima. This simple document is an agreement made in that city on February 13, 1613 by Juan Flores Chacón, a merchant, to pay one Juan de Sarria, a bookdealer of the viceregal capital, the sum of 740 pesos and 4 reales for a total of about 155 volumes.[14] Sixty percent of the total number of books, whose titles are appended to the promissory note, are works of Mateo Alemán, chiefly Guzmán de Alfarache .
Lima at the time of this simple transaction was a thriving city, still the administrative and cultural center of the greater part of the southern continent. Its population was about twenty-five thousand, of which approximately twelve thousand were Spanish, ten thousand were Negroes, while Indian and mixed elements composed the remainder.[15] The rich silver mines were yielding generous treasure, and discoveries of new deposits of precious metals were frequently reported. These fortunate circumstances facilitated the amassing of ample fortunes, provided a still larger leisure class than was presented in 1583, and had stimulated commericial activities in the
viceregal capital to such a degree that, on the very day that the public notary recorded the agreement of Flores Chacón and Sarria concerning a batch of books by Alemán and others, the Viceroy officially inaugurated the Consulado de la Universidad de Mercaderes, a sort of Chamber of Commerce, with regulations similar to those of the highly important Consulado at Seville.[16] This economic well-being, so long enjoyed by Lima, had fostered even further the growth of large religious communities, and had attracted many educated scions of Spanish aristocracy and a number of intellectuals and creative writers from the mother country. All these diverse elements afforded a profitable market to the book business, and gave an impetus to less uplifting diversions as well. As in New Spain, the abundant wealth encouraged laxness in the overpopulated convents and monasteries of the viceregal capital, and prosperous laymen sought pleasures which moved the diocesan synod, at a meeting that year of 1613, to take vigorous measures against immoral abuses clearly apparent in the social life of the city. The corrales de comedias, for example, were approaching the height of their popularity as theatrical companies from Spain performed the works of famous siglo de oro playwrights to enthusiastic audiences. Some actresses were, unfortunately, prone to add to the appeal of this form of amusement—and, incidentally, to the gate receipts—by also introducing to the limeño public an early version of the modern strip tease.[17]
But the opposite extremes, which so often characterize the Spaniard and his ways, were also represented in the Lima of 1613. In one of the cells of the convent of the Third Order of St. Dominic there languished a frail nun, Isabel Flores y Oliva (1586–1617), who had won wide repute for saintliness and who, later in the century, was to be canonized as Santa Rosa de Lima, the patron saint of the Americans. And only a few years before a venerated Dominican, Diego de Hojeda (157?–1615), had written in a convent of the city the best sacred epic in the Spanish language, La Cristiada, which has been likened to Milton's Paradise lost . Only the year before some ecclesiastical misunderstanding and injustice had divested this saintly poet of his office as Prior of the Convento del Rosario and exiled him to Huánuco, thereby hastening his death.[18]
Unimportant in itself, the promissory note of Juan Flores Chacón to Juan de Sarria in the Lima of 1613 is a significant bit of evidence of the thriving book trade of the capital. Its interest lies chiefly in the predominant number of Alemán's books in the appended list. Of the total of some 155 volumes representing thirty-seven different titles, seventy-four are copies of Guzmán de Alfarache and nineteen of La vida de San Antonio de Padua . In other words, the copies of El pícaro constitute almost one-half of the entire lot of books for which Flores Chacón gave Sarria his personal note. Nearly all other titles on the list are present in only one or two copies; a few old standbys of the book trade, such as the Arte de Antonio (Nebrija) reached as high as ten copies each. It seems fair, therefore, to interpret the presence of so large a number of copies of a single work as some indication of the salability of the picaresque novel particularly and as further evidence of the wide and sustained popularity which this moralizing tale enjoyed in early Peru. Alemán, living obscurely that year of 1613 in the great viceroyalty of New Spain and publishing his last work there, was doubtless wholly unaware of this transaction and its implied tribute to his genius. And it is equally unlikely that he enjoyed any royalties or returns from the sale of the seventy-four copies of his masterpiece and of the nineteen copies of his pious Vida de San Antonio . This seems all the more certain when one notes the modest value they represented in the promissory note. The ninety-three volumes by Alemán are worth only 69 pesos and 6 reales, each copy apparently appraised at 6 reales. Deducting this sum there is a balance of 670 pesos and 6 reales (figuring the peso at 8 reales) as the total valuation of the remaining sixty-two or so books on the list. Even without royalties to pay, Alemán's works would seem to have been obtained at an exceptionally low price.[19]
The other titles offer little of special interest. The list is typical in that religious works have a large representation, the greatest number of copies falling to the Manual de diversas oraciones y spirituales exercicios of the renowned Fray Luis de Granada. The ten copies of the Arte or Latin grammar of Antonio de Nebrija are further evidence of the omnipresence of this text in colonial records and of its widespread and sustained use throughout the period. Zurita's Anales de Aragón and Herrera's Historia de Portugal
may be singled out as examples of secular nonfiction, to which should be added, perhaps, the readable Viaje entretenido of Rojas Villandrando. Besides Guzmán de Alfarache, so impressively represented, belles-lettres can count one copy each of the Romancero general, of Guevara's Epístolas familiares, of that miscellany of Pedro Mexía, Silva de varia lección, and of the Transformaciones of Ovid, together with "unas historias etyopicas " of Heliodorus.
The name of one partner in this transaction, the Lima bookdealer Juan de Sarria, will recur conspicuously in the next two chapters, for there is little doubt that the merchant who turned over the seventy-four copies of El pícaro in exchange for Juan Flores Chacón's promissory note was the same person who was instrumental in bringing the first copies of Don Quijote to readers in South America seven years before, when, it appears, he was just entering upon his business career. For this accident of association a youthful bookseller may claim a fortuitous glory in the annals of literary history, since it was his happy destiny to facilitate, though unwittingly, the introduction and distribution of two of the greatest masterpieces of Spanish literature into the remote vice-royalty of Peru.