Coloquio Cervantes:
< http://www.ou.edu/cervantes >
Eds. Kurt Reichenberger & A. Robert Lauer

ASUNTO CRÍTICO DE DISCUSIÓN PARA ESTA SEMANA:
Segundo asunto crítico para dialogar:
18-25 de abril de 2005

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<Nota bene de Kurt Reichenberger:
Members of the «Coloquio» should know that we are interested in eventual 
results:
if someone, animated by the discussions writes 10 or 15 pages on the subject,
we would include it in the publication>

Catalina de Palacios, the young lady Cervantes married in Esquivias: 
Co–authoress of the »Quixote« of 1605?

      The title sounds like a bad joke: Cervantes the great novelist and 
the young lady of Esquivias, co–authors? And as a finishing touch someone 
has written that she was unable to read. In similar circumstances it is 
advisable to start with general considerations: those of the correlations 
between the private life of an author and his work. This task has been 
postulated before, but is rather problematic in the case of Cervantes for 
the lack of solid facts in the biographies on his life (1). At any rate, 
some general observations might be helpful. Men, as a rule, are ambitious, 
wanting to be strong, heroic, radiant in their glory. This is particularly 
the case with artists and authors: to show up before an admiring public, in 
particular with an audience of charming young ladies interested in les 
Belles Lettres. Whenever they fall in love, they will recite their verses 
to their adored females, and almost swoon at a gentle glance from the 
damsels. Or, stricken with jealous feelings, they will act up and raise 
their brows.
      Certainly, the situation in which Cervantes lives is not so dramatic. 
Since 1584 he had been married to Catalina de Palacios, a young lady 
belonging to one of the important families in Esquivias. The matrimony was 
a success. She admired his circumspection and his firm determination, and 
he simply adored her, for she was intelligent and energetic. She was a 
peach of a woman. Enamoured of her, and with the generosity typical for 
Miguel de Cervantes, he wants to dedicate to her and lay down before her 
tender feet a glorious work of literature, renowned all over Spain. But, in 
this case, Fortune, the goddess with the golden ringlets, proved renitent, 
not willing to help: His Galatea is a flop, and in the corrales they 
represent not his comedias, but those of Lope de Vega. Nevertheless, 
Cervantes does not give up, and continues to dream of a great work, worthy 
to be presented to his beloved Catalina. And in the prison of Castro del 
Río the spark catches fire. At least Cervantes says so, but with him one 
never can be sure, whether it is the naked truth or one of his ingenious 
jokes.
      Some years later, in December of 1598, Cervantes recites in the 
Cathedral of Seville, at the catafalque of the late Philip II, a satirical 
sonnet, which causes a tremendous scandal. For Cervantes it is a 
revelation. It serves him as a proof: If such a riot is possible with less 
than twenty verses, the course is right, he must go on in the same 
direction, roll up his sleeves and write a novel of about five hundred 
pages, all of them larded with satire. As a matter of course the joke with 
the prison of Castro del Río in the Prologue is a witty one. But the most 
important truth is the fact that he wrote the Quixote not in Castro del 
Río, but in Esquivias. No doubt, Esquivias.
      We ought to imagine the situation: A little village, a happy 
matrimony, the partners enamoured of each other. Cervantes, pen in his 
hand, in a pensive mood. Catalina, where? At his side, naturally. Miguel de 
Cervantes, now decided, writes: «En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre 
no quiero acordarme» ("In a village of La Mancha, whose name I don’t want 
to remember"). A mischievous look, to the side, at Catalina. She, for a 
moment, utterly confused. Then she gives her husband a tender glance full 
of admiration. Esquivias! What else? A riddle of such an eccentric sort! No 
one would be able to solve it. Thanks to the paradoxical form it would 
remain a secret, known only by the two of them.
      Here we might comment that the knights-errant drag to their damsels a 
strangulated dragon. Catalina's beloved husband presents her with the great 
novel he is just starting. And the ingenious riddle is kind of a respectful 
dedication. He is a darling, and she gives him a kiss on his bearded cheek. 
The rest of mankind, of course, would be on the wrong track. Everyone who 
reads «de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme», tends to think of a 
disagreeable event that the author might combine with the name of the 
village: an old, shabby inn with a disastrous meal, or a tremendous row 
with some boozed creeps: things he doesn’t want to remember.
      Or Valladolid in 1604. The last revision of the manuscript must be 
handed in to the censors of the Santo Oficio. Present would be Catalina, at 
the right side of Cervantes; Magdalena and Constanza at the other. Miguel 
reads the first chapter of the book. At the end of the chapter Don Quixote 
indulges in day-dreams, invents a brutal giant whom he defeats and sends to 
his beloved Dulcinea. His name runs: Caraculiambro. What follows is a wild 
emotion: cries of protest, bewildered frowns, laboriously suppressed 
laughter, accompanied on the part of Catalina by manifest shouts of joy, 
for she knows the eccentric inventions of her husband from experience. Then 
a great discussion ensues: Whether it is a mean and unacceptable obscenity, 
or a stroke of genius which exemplifies the state of the mad hero’s mind. 
And in the midst of the uproar one finds a suitably amused Cervantes, who 
wonders at the effect of an ironical name, a bit risqué, improper, and, at 
any rate, completely inadequate in the heroic context of the romances of 
chivalry. Critics, as a matter of course, will shout al unísono that these 
are idle phantasmagorias, quite impossible to prove. Nonetheless, there 
exist some arguments, which should be taken into consideration.
      In the first place, it cannot be disregarded that Catalina was an 
intelligent woman and, even more, a mujer letrada (2). And we may take it 
for granted that the romances of chivalry are not all Greek to her. Her 
uncle, the prelate Juan de Palacios, took charge of the education of his 
niece, and it seems that she learned to read, in joint readings with him, 
books of prayer and, presumably, also libros de caballerías, most favored 
in those days (3). Another relative of Catalina was Alonso Quijada: He was 
a monk and a passionate reader of chivalric romances. At first sight it 
might seem a paradox but, most probably, Catalina de Palacios was, with 
respect to the libros de caballerías, more informed than her husband. For 
where and when in his agitated life had he a chance to read libros de 
caballerías? With the Jesuits in Seville? Certainly not. With his admired 
López de Hoyos in Alcalá de Henares? Treatises by Erasmus, perhaps, but no 
romances of chivalry. During the campaigns in the Mediterranean there was 
no time for extensive reading or, for that matter, during the years of his 
captivity in Algiers. Back in Spain he was busy writing for the theater, 
and in the pastoral genre with his Galatea. But romances of chivalry, no. 
On the other hand, his Catalina, coddled niece of Juan de Palacios, shares 
with her uncle fifteen (!) years of joint reading. In other words, she is 
an expert as far as contemporary literature and even romances on chivalry 
are concerned. As a matter of fact, one can hardly put aside the suspicion 
that most of the competent judgments exposed in the escrutinio de la 
biblioteca (DQ I, 6) are inspired by the adored Catalina.
      And there is more. Cervantes, in spite of his malicious protest in El 
viaje del Parnaso, reveals himself to be a consummate expert on satire. The 
Quixote of 1605 evokes, in a carefully encoded way, what he considers to be 
the most disastrous scandals of his times (4). And it seems that it is 
Catalina who provides him with the fundamental hints: to begin with the 
gravest case of all, the limpieza de la sangre, which poisoned the social 
atmosphere of the entire century. Cervantes proceeds with the utmost 
precaution using skillful tricks to raise the curiosity of the reader and 
to disorientate him at the same time. He never says that Don Quixote is a 
converso, one of those New Christians, envied, despised, and even hated by 
the great majority of Old Christian stock. But he insinuates it. He begins 
with the enigmatic title of his novel and continues with sundry thoughts 
that never leave undisturbed the curious reader. Catalina’s family members 
(and for many generations this was one of the three oldest and most 
important clans in Esquivias) were related to the Quijadas, a riquísima 
family of conversos. Catalina knew their members and was acquainted with 
the execrable troubles they had in daily life (5).
      Cervantes uses that background information provided to him by 
Catalina. In the first chapter of the Quixote the first name he mentions 
with respect to his hero is Quijada. In his times, certainly not only the 
inhabitants of Esquivias and Toledo were informed about this name, but also 
everyone else with some insight into history. For Quijada was a most famous 
family. Something else Catalina might have known from her uncle or one of 
the Quijada family members was the office of the casamentero, which is 
based on an old Sephardic tradition. However, in the Siete Partidas of 
Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221-1284), the activities of a marriage broker were 
considered to be grave delicts and punished most severely. Cervantes, 
informed of the facts, transforms this knowledge into a curious episode in 
the chapter on the galley slaves (DQ I,22) [6]. Finally, at the end of the 
novel, Cervantes inserts one more spiny hint, the most daring of them all. 
In his dialogue with the canon of Toledo, Don Quixote mentions the famous 
Don Gutierre Quixada and pretends to be one of his descendants «por línea 
recta de varón» (DQ I,49). This would have been a tremendous shock for the 
reader of the day. It would have been considered simply incredible to 
imagine his Don Quixote as the direct line descendant of a Jew (7). 
However, Cervantes, called to task, would probably grin maliciously and 
tell the nervous reader that he saw no trouble at all. Imperturbably, he 
would probably start explaining to him that there was no reason to fuss. 
For as everyone knew, his hero was mad, on account of his reading day and 
night, and no one should pay attention to the assumptions of a fool. Also 
in this case one can be sure that Cervantes was informed by Catalina, who 
knew such details concerning the ancestors of the Quixada family.
      When Cervantes started to write the Quixote he had attained the 
fundamental insight that, to produce a bestseller it is indispensable to 
find a decent way to provoke the reader. The terrible problems originated 
from the fatal concept of purity of blood, which was at the moment an issue 
of life or death. At this point it may be pertinent to pose the indiscreet 
question as to which one of the happy couple had the brilliant idea of the 
title with the devilish epithet «de la Mancha», a title that evokes the 
genealogical stain on the escutcheon of the «manchego»—or «manchado»—hero, 
as the barber maliciously suggests. Which of them invented the ingenious 
trick: Cervantes, or Catalina? Was it the result of an animated discussion 
or of their thrashing out their differences in bed? At any rate, there is 
reason to think things over.

Notes

      1 With respect to biographic details see the volume of Krzysztof 
Sliwa, Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Estudios de literatura 95). 
Kassel 2005, Part III, Chapter 3.
      2 The legend that Catalina de Palacios could not read is due to an 
error. When Cervantes died, it was she who procured the edition of the 
Persiles. With respect to Catalina de Palacios see María Carmen Marín Pina, 
«Don Quijote, las mujeres y los libros de caballerías». In: Cervantes y su 
mundo II (Estudios de literatura 91). Kassel 2005, pp. 309-340.
      3 In Part IV of El viaje del Parnaso, Cervantes states with a 
malicious smile that «Nunca voló la pluma humilde mía / Por la región 
satírica, baxeza / Que á infames premios y desgracia guía». But already in 
the next tercet he confesses that the best sonnet he wrote was «Voto a Dios 
que me espanta esta grandeza». Cervantes recited the sonnet in the 
Cathedral of Sevilla, at the catafalque of Philip II. A sonnet, which 
crushes the renown of the Rey Prudente with devastating irony.
      4 Don Quixote's wild attacks on the windmills and the herds of sheep 
evoke the greatest monetary scandal of the century: the silver coins, 
called by the experts in the mint moneda de molino, were replaced by the 
vellones, coins in copper, which officially had the same value, but were 
practically worthless. The chapter on the galley slaves contains an encoded 
critique of the courts of justice, and the doctrinaire clergymen of the 
time are ridiculed in the persons of the curate Pero Pérez and the canon of 
Toledo. See Kurt & Theo Reichenberger, Cervantes: el «Quijote» y sus 
mensajes destinados al lector. Kassel 2004, with special attention to the 
chapters 5, 7, 15 and 21.
      5 Cervantes mentions Quijada as a possible family name of his 
protagonist in the first chapter of the volume. Américo Castro and Marcel 
Bataillon smelled a rat, supposed that there was a secret sense in the 
name, related it to quijada “jaw-bone”, and to the biblical hero Samson, 
who slew a thousand enemies with the jaw-bone of a mule. Thus they 
constructed an argument for the converso status of Don Quixote. But they 
overlooked a more direct allusion to a genealogical stain in the escutcheon 
of Don Quixote, the manchego «manchado», as the barber apostrophes him. In 
Esquivias lived the Quijada, a well-to-do family, related to the Palacios, 
a most ancient family of Sephardic origin. See K. Sliva, La vida de 
Cervantes Saavedra, o.c., Part IV, Chapter 5.
      6. Among the prisoners, condemned to row in the galley of the king, 
there is also an old marriage broker. Don Quixote interviews him and starts 
an encomium on this office, based on an old Sephardic tradition. See Kurt & 
Theo Reichenberger, «El alcahuete condenado. Un detalle enigmático en el 
episodio de los galeotes». In: Cervantes y su mundo I (Estudios de 
literatura 90). Kassel 2004, pp. 275-280.
      7 With respect to Gutierre Quijada see K. Sliwa, La vida de Cervantes 
Saavedra, o.c., Part IV, Chapter 5.

Kurt Reichenberger

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