THE play you will read in this volume—Lope de Vega's San
Diego de Alcalá—is by no means one of his masterpieces. It can scarcely be
compared to works of the quality and complexity of The Gentleman from Olmedo,
Justice without Revenge, or Peribáñez and The Commander of Ocaña.
For this reason, it has hardly attracted detailed critical attention. Adolf
Schaeffer and Wolfgang von Wurzbach have commented on the miracles wrought by
Diego and the child-like naiveté that pervades the work. Franz Grillparzer
considered it absurd and scarcely acceptable to an audience that was not intent
upon witnessing its own values and convictions affirmed. The Swiss historian and
critic Sismondi—noted for his protestant dryness by Menéndez Pelayo, his "sequedad
protestante," a phrase he also used to characterize George Ticknor and his
literary judgments—generalizes that the "sacred pieces of Lope de Vega . . . are
. . . so immoral and extravagant, that if we were to judge the poet after them
alone, they would impress us with the most disadvantageous idea of his genius."
After discussing some of the play's extravagances—the appearance of angels and
the Devil, some miracles performed by Diego, and the Saint's death to the
accompaniment of sweet perfume and angelic music—Sismondi concludes that
"however eccentric these compositions may be, we may readily imagine that the
people were delighted with them. Supernatural beings, transformations and
prodigies, were constantly presented to their eyes; their curiosity was the more
vividly excited, as in the miraculous course of events it was impossible to
predict what would next appear, and every improbability was removed by faith,
which always came to the aid of the poet, with an injunction to believe what
could not be explained."
The critic who has written most sympathetically about the
play is Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. And yet, despite his devotion to
expressions of Catholic orthodoxy and fervor, he is willing to recognize that it
is a work of monstrous dramatic structure. What is there, then, about this play
to recommend it to our attention? Is there more to it than the
fortuitous detail that the mission founded in this city in 1769 by Fray Junípero
Serra bears the name of San Diego de Alcalá? On this score Menéndez Pelayo can
be of assistance to us. The play may well be one of the most irregularly made of
its kind, still it is rich in poetry that projects with extraordinary immediacy
the life and customs of the period Lope would evoke. In fact everything, says
Menéndez Pelayo, is presented with such vivacity and color, yet with so little
exaggeration, that theatrical illusion becomes confused with reality. Even the
miracles, presented on stage with a certain course directness, seem to enter the
realm of human affairs, so that the boundaries between reality and the
supernatural disappear, all by virtue of Lope's plastic and naturalist powers.
It may come as a disappointment to you that San Diego de
Alcalá is not directly concerned with America. But, in truth, as Professor
Stephen Gilman has recently noted in reiterating and reinterpreting the views of
Menéndez Pelayo, "Lope de Vega, whose range of themes embarked all the past that
was available to him—Biblical, ancient, foreign as well as national—, . . .
produced a scanty harvest of plays concerned with the discovery and conquest of
America." In fact, in the vast corpus of his works, we find only two plays that
really qualify, namely, The Discovery of the New World by Christopher
Columbus and Arauco Vanquished. But, if Menéndez Pelayo is correct in
his assessment of San Diego de Alcalá, a play about the life of a
Franciscan saint who died in 1463, then we should come to know a reasonable
amount about the social and historical circumstances from which the discovery
and conquest of America would emerge, that event which Francisco López de Gómara
would describe in 1552 as "the greatest thing to have happened since the
creation of the world, with the exception of the incarnation and death of its
Creator," for which reason the Indies are called the New World.
Before turning our attention to San Diego de Alcalá
itself, I should like to look at Lope's play concerning The Discovery of the
New World by Christopher Columbus for some insight into his view of the
Indies, that symbol of ineffable spiritual and material wealth, that
fountainhead of poetic expression, whose very name and inaccessibility would
inspire expressions such as these: "!Ah, señor! Fuese a las Indias del Cielo."
('Oh, my lord,' says a servant on observing his saintly master in a mystical
trance, 'he has departed for the Indies of Heaven').
!O grandes, o riquísimas conquistas
de las Indias de Dios, de aquel gran mundo
tan escondido a las mundanas vistas!
How wonderful beyond words is the conquest
of the Indies of God, that great world
which human sight may dream of, but not see!
The parting of Columbus with Ferdinand and Isabella. The discovery and conquest of America would later be described as "the greatest thing to have happened since the creation of the world. . . ." |
The Indies of Heaven and the Indies of God
signify the supreme human aspiration: mystical union with God; a conquest no
less awe-inspiring than that of the conquistadores.
Antonio Domínguez Ortiz has recently written that "for a
minority [of Spaniards] the missionary ideal was uppermost; for the great body
of the discoverers the economic consideration had top priority." Elsewhere he
observes in greater detail that:
"the motivation of human actions is very complex, which makes
it futile to debate whether the motives behind the Discovery were of a material
or spiritual order. Both had their part to play in differing degree; missionary
zeal was no doubt uppermost in the mind of Isabel the Catholic, while in that of
her husband Ferdinand, of Columbus himself and of the explorers in general, it
took second place to political and economic interests, [but] without ever being
totally absent from their cares.... [It should be said, in fact, that the
Spaniards fulfilled their charge to convert the natives] even to the detriment
of the royal finances. In this regard there is nothing improbable about the
anecdote attributed to Philip II, who on being told of the high cost of
preserving the Philippines compared to what could be gotten out of them, replied
that to maintain the Catholic religion in the Philippines he would spend all the
revenues of his kingdoms."
On the other hand, one cannot forget that, especially in the
seventeenth century, there was no lack of clergymen who displayed an excessive
attachment to wealth and returned to Spain with large fortunes, using their
exalted positions to avoid paying duties on their ill-gotten gains.
In Lope's play on the discovery of the New World we already
find a lively presentation of the conflict between the saving of souls and the
plundering of gold. In a most ingenious way, what might have been a long and
somewhat tedious soliloquy is infused by Lope with dramatic vitality. As the
scene opens, Columbus sits disconsolately with a compass in his hand, poring
over a large map. He has just received yet another rebuff in his efforts to
obtain financial support for his expedition. As he laments his lack of funds,
Imagination appears—descending from on high, dressed in brilliant and variegated
colors—and assures him that once the war against the Moors has been won, Spain
will come to his assistance. When he doubts this possibility, Imagination
carries Columbus through the air to the other side of the stage. And then, as if
the play had suddenly become a kind of secularized auto sacramental—reminiscent
of a dream that Columbus described in a letter to the Catholic Rulers—a cloth is
lifted and Providence is seen seated on a throne, having at his right the
Christian religion and at his left Idolatry. A trial ensues in which the
Christian Religion and Idolatry plead their respective causes for possession of
the Indies. Idolatry maintains that he has lived in the West Indies for
unnumbered years and now Christian Religion would take his possessions away by
the agency of a poor man, namely, Columbus. When Providence decides that the
Conquest must be undertaken in the interest of Christ, Idolatry exclaims:
"Surely you know that it is avarice alone that brings these strangers toward
those distant shores. Under the pretext of religion—insists Idolatry—they seek
the hidden treasure of the country." Providence responds with nice legalistic
subtlety that "God judges only the intention. If because of the gold that it
contains, souls are saved, as there is a reward in heaven, it is clear enough
that there is also one on earth. Besides, with Ferdinand the Catholic all
suspicion must disappear." At this point the Devil rushes in and urges that
Ferdinand should busy himself with his wars and insists that "it is avarice, the
thirst for gold, that leads the Spaniards to the Indies. Spain has no need of
gold; she has gold herself and should search at home for it."
In an early manuscript, SANCHO EL VALIENTE (Sancho the Brave)
c. 1285, Spanish Christians from the northwest are depicted fighting back after
the Moslem conquest of Spain. |
In the following scenes, Spain's greatest glories are
relived: the Moors are defeated at Granada and we witness the entry of Ferdinand
and Isabel into the city. The King of Granada is sorely grieved. To the Catholic
Sovereigns he says: "Enter into your city from which I am forever exiled. Then
will I absent myself in the greatest solitude that human patience has ever
seen." When he hears the joyous Christians proclaim "Granada
for Don Ferdinand!", he laments with the poignant lyricism of a
traditional ballad: "The weight of such a misfortune overpowers me. Farewell,
illustrious Granada, laurel of Spain, whose white and lustrous forehead is
hidden in the Sierra Nevada. Today all is red with bloodshed. Farewell, my
Albaicín and my beloved Alhambra. Farewell my palace, adieu, my dear country,
taken from me by the envy of my near ones joined to the swords of the
Christians. From the highest tower to the foundations, pour out your grief for
him who begs you to weep for this disaster after having shared in his good
fortune." The reenactment of such moments, the evocation over and over again of
such victories, of such richly symbolic events in the plays of Lope de Vega and
his contemporaries, served to bolster a waning spirit. By reliving past
achievements they hoped to inspire new ones of similar grandeur and—what is even
more significant—of identical spiritual content.
Columbus is immediately aware of the conquest of Granada and
appears at Court ready to make a deal. "The moment has come," he assures, "to
gain a whole world, for no less than this do I offer you." With messianic zeal,
crusading fervor and a poetic license that enables him to predict an unknown
future, he promises "to conquer those idolatrous Indians, for it is just that
they be brought to the Christian faith by a king who has been surnamed The
Catholic, and by the wisest and most pious of queens who has ever been known
since the Golden Age." Ferdinand asks what is needed for the expedition and
Columbus' reply could not be more direct: "Money, Señor, for money is the master
in all things, the north star, the compass, the route, intelligence, diligence,
power, the foundation and the greatest friend." It is as if Lope were
remembering Columbus' own words about the power of gold: "Gold is the most
precious of all commodities; gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it
has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from
purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise."
When Ferdinand inquires of his treasurer where he might
obtain the 16,000 ducats that Columbus requires, he informs him that Luis de
Santángel could be of assistance. In Henry Lea's classic on the Spanish
Inquisition we read that the name Santángel occurred with wearying repition on
the lists of autos de fe. Luis de Santángel, Ferdinand's financial
secretary, who advanced to Isabella the 16,000 or 17,000 ducats to enable
Columbus to discover the New World, was penanced on July 17, 1491 for his Judaic faith.
When the Spaniards successfully reach the Indies and make
contact with the natives, we are again reminded of the conflict between
religious fervor and greed. Listen to this conversation between Columbus and his
men:
COLUMBUS. I intend to take back ten of these men, and I
shall also take such animals and birds as are unknown in Europe. [Lope does
not bother to explain that Columbus—seeing how unimpressive were the material
proceeds of his enterprise, according to Domínguez Ortiz—sought to turn it to good account by using
Indians as human merchandise, as was already done with Turks, Berbers and African Negroes.]
TERRAZAS. Spain expects something else. I presume you know that.
COLUMBUS. You mean gold?
PINZON. Exactly.
COLUMBUS (showing gold to an Indian). Do you have this here?
TERRAZAS. He said yes!
COLUMBUS. Why so much rejoicing?
ARANA. Because you will find gold here.
COLUMBUS. The salvation of these men is the principal treasure.
TERRAZAS. What good fortune! Gold! Let us look for the gold! (To an Indian) Go, my friend, bring us some of this.
ARANA. He is going.
PINZŌN (to Columbus). That should not make you angry.
COLUMBUS. What angers me is that you ask for it so soon.
When the Indian returns with gold ingots, the Spaniards
immediately grab them.
COLUMBUS. Take them with less greediness.
FRIAR. What! You kiss these ingots?
TERRAZAS. Yes, my Father, while you teach these poor people the Faith.
The act ends in a studied climax of Broadway musical
proportions, when Columbus exclaims: "Oh Heaven, today I have established the
Faith in another, New World. Spain, I bring you this world. New World!" And all
respond: "!Nuevo Mundo!"
In the final act, Lope shows his audience yet again the
endless attraction of gold, but at the same time he shows its insidious effects.
TERRAZAS. I now know that without contentment riches are
nothing. What good is all my gold to me now? The more I have, the more I look
for, and I am never satisfied. Oh contentment, since you are not in gold,
where are you? You seem to be nowhere, for I begged the heavens to give me
more and more of this metal and at present I am rich and I have no pleasure.
ARANA. You are right. I have also noticed that gold is only
a delusion, a chimera, like the sand-filled coffers of the Cid. They only
deceive themselves who think they can find contentment here on earth. Tell me,
Contentment, what are you? Honor, life, riches? He who would have you and
thinks you are in gold, does not know where you are.
In the remaining scenes of the play, other significant
aspects of the Conquest are reviewed. A beautiful Indian woman, who knows more
geography than she should, combines religion and gold in a series of fervent prayers.
TACUANA. May you see this land subject to your laws and may
your God and Christ triumph over our Gods. May your cross. . . be worshipped
from Haiti to beautiful Chile! And may the Mass which we await move our
hearts!. . .May you return to your fatherland, carrying with you enough of the
gold of these mountains so that even your poor children will have playthings of gold. And
then may you bring us your sons so that they may marry our daughters and mix
their blood with ours so that we can all be Spaniards!
It is as if she were aware of the burning polemic between Las Casas and Sepúlveda
and sought to mediate between them, recognizing with Sepúlveda that the Indians
were socially and culturally inferior to the Spaniards, but understanding with
Las Casas that they could overcome their shortcomings by living in intimate
contact with the humane and civilizing Christian faith of their conquerors, a
faith built on a sense of freedom for all human beings. For, as Las Casas once
wrote: "todo linaje de los hombres es uno," 'the lineage of all men is
identical;' a declaration that reminds us of his own mixed or
"tainted" blood (his Judeo-Christian background) and his passionate
urge to minimize its significance. Through his vindication of the Indian, Las
Casas hoped to achieve as well social salvation for his New Christian brethren.
In an imaginative illustration, Columbus' arrival in the New World is greeted with Indians presenting treasure. |
Later, in a scene that would illustrate how the Spaniards
must have communicated the rudiments of their faith to the natives, Terrazas
speaks at length to the Indian Dulcan about the Trinity and the Mass, among
other things. Dulcan confesses that it is all very obscure to him and difficult
to understand. But with uncanny intuition, a desire to please and an innocent
irony, he brings together for a moment of illusory harmony the conflictual
ingredients of the Conquest:
DULCAN. You cannot say that I do not love your
Christ, since I have given you the gold with which you have made
what you call your chalice and other vessels.
Dulcan's sentiments are expressed again in another more
formal setting when Ferdinand says to Isabella: "Madame, take this gold; I
present it to you that you may use it as you wish." "And I, my Lord," she
replies, "I shall give it to the church of Toledo to make a proper monstrance."
It is likely that the Devil's last words on the subject sound
more truthful to us than to Lope's audience. "You are a fool"—he says to Dulcan—"to
believe in the friendship of these Spaniards! They covet your gold, so they make
themselves saints and pretend to be decent Christians; meanwhile others will
come and take away all your riches and carry them back to Spain."
In the play's closing moments we witness the apotheosis of
the Discovery and Conquest. To the Catholic Rulers Columbus says: "I give you
another world to rule. Here are its first fruits: these men, this gold." And
Ferdinand replies in the unitary voice of Church and State: "In all antiquity
there is no captain to compare with you. You deserve the laurels and palms of an
incomparable Captain for making this gift to Spain and giving numberless souls
to God! You, Christopher Columbus, were predestined for this miracle by your
baptismal name. The author of such redemption has in him something of Christ."
Christianity, the final defeat of the Moors at Granada,
greed, the innocent sensuality of easily available exotic beauties that would
unleash untold erotic fantasies, civilizing mestizaje, these are the
themes that are given dramatic form over and over again in Lope's limited
repertory of works on the New World and in his plays on The Guanches of
Tenerife and Conquest of Gran Canarias and Las Batuecas of the Duke of
Alba, called in a later version The New World in Castile, since Las
Batuecas was an isolated area discovered in the very year Columbus set sail for America.
A quick look at The Guanches of Tenerife will show its
relationship to the play I have just discussed. In fact, certain scenes from the
Columbus play were erroneously attributed to it. From the outset the inhabitants
of Tenerife are identified as barbarians who must be placed under the divine
yoke of Christianity. Lope is not unsympathetic to their situation: their
poverty, their unaggressiveness, the honest simplicity of their existence. On
more than one occasion we hear King Bencomo of the Guanches movingly defend his
people and their way of life, ending always with allusions to the absence of
wealth: "What wealth do they think I have, what silver or gold? What do they
want from me that they persecute me so? ... I can well complain about their
tyrannical aggression, since I have no wealth that they may covet; still they
come to inflict harm on me in the solitude of these wooded hills." "If all my
wealth amounts to a few sea shells, why are Spaniards so interested in
conquering my modest possessions?"
The Spaniards, of course, are in search of honor, fame,
opinión, though there are the usual allusions to gold and silver. They
assure the natives that Ferdinand and Isabella are motivated by Christian piety
alone. The appearance of the Archangel Michael with sword in hand announcing
that he is conquering the Canaries for Christ and a miracle or two performed by
the Virgin and her infant Son make one think of this passage from Don Quixote:
Even in their profane plays they make bold to introduce
miracles without any more reason or consideration than because they think that
some miracle—or effect, as they call it—will go well, and that the ignorant
public will enjoy it and come to the play.
As Otis H. Green would have it, in the Discovery and Conquest
of America—in the Canaries too, I would add—things bad as well as good can be
encountered, "but the good—he claims—vastly overbalances the bad. The suffering
of bodies is of no ultimate consequence; what matters is the salvation of souls,
the routing of the powers of superstition and of evil, the growth of God's
kingdom on earth, achieved by frail and sinful human beings who, because of
their heroic faith, are miraculously aided by the Divine hand." Ultimately, what
seemed to count for "official" Spain was neither virtue nor merit, only the
triumph of Catholicism . . . and the rewards it would bring.
Octavio Paz has observed, building silently on the writings
of Américo Castro, that "the Moslems and the Iberians confronted the problem of
otherness by means of conversion, European Christians by means of extermination
or exclusion. . . . Iberian policy in the New World copies point by point the
policy of the Moslems in Asia Minor, India, North Africa, and in Spain itself:
conversion, whether voluntarily or by blood and fire. Though it may seem strange, the evangelization of
America was a Moslem enterprise in its style and inspiration. The destructive
fury of the Spaniards has the same theological origin as the Moslems'."
It is such a spirit, embodied in a God who for the Indians
"comes down from Heaven and talks of nothing but sin" and made effective through
his inquisitional agents, that would render impossible the irenic spirit of
conciliation advocated by Spain's New Christian community. In fact, as Juan de
Solórzano Pereira wrote in 1647 in his Política Indiana, "from the very
beginning of the discovery and colonization of the West Indies, when the Gospel
and divine worship were first introduced and presented to them, the Cardinal of
Toledo, Inquisitor General, charged and entrusted to the first bishops that they
should take action in causes concerning the faith which might present themselves
in their districts." The Conversos' utopian dream that a pluralist
paradise might emerge from the nightmare of history, offering neutral spaces and
public places where the descendants of Moors, Christians and Jews might mingle
civilly and socially, a social system in which differences in faith made no
difference in society, was doomed from its inception. The Inquisition would
persecute individuals who took delight in envisioning a world in which all
nations would be saved and all souls would be blessed. And it found intolerable
the visionary religious syncretism of the Moriscos, some of whom were
certain that every individual under the law of Christ, under that of the Jew and
that of the Moor, could be saved, if he kept the precepts of his religion fully.
What was to prevail was the messianic dream of the Hispano-Christians, expressed
in the words of Hernando de Acuña: "una grey, y un pastor, solo en el suelo,"
'one flock and one shepherd, alone on earth.' The unity of faith would be
achieved at an incalculable cost, even at the expense of essential evangelical precepts.
These last remarks lead us, finally, to San Diego de
Alcalá, the play that you will read shortly and in which all the themes I've
been rehearsing for you will have at least a brief hearing. It is, in fact, a
kind of bridge between Spain, the Canaries and the New World both through the
figure of its protagonist and in its subject matter.
Some years ago I wrote an article on the first scene of
San Diego de Alcalá, using it to demonstrate that the phrase hidalgos
cansados, that appears in it and in other contemporary texts, meant
Christians of Jewish origin. The scene is an extraordinarily vivid portrayal of
a society bitterly divided against itself into Old Christians—those whose
families had "always" been Christian—and New Christians or Conversos—converts
from Judaism or the descendants of converted Jews—, and justifies—sadly enough—Menéndez
Pelayo's remark that in it, theatrical illusion becomes confused with real life.
The scene—amply confirmed in its reality by Nicholas Round's study of the Toledo
rebellion of 1449—presents a council meeting at which are in attendance two
village mayors, some peasants, a gentleman-hidalgo and two councilmen. [Note: This is Professor Silverman's own translation.]
FIRST MAYOR. Have the others arrived?
SECOND MAYOR. No, the representative of the gentlemen is missing.
HIDALGO. He's not missing; I'm here.
FIRST MAYOR. Evil is never absent for long.
HIDALGO. Am I evil?
FIRST MAYOR. You're certainly not goodness personified; you're an hidalgo and
that's more than enough.
HIDALGO. You damn peasants of low breeding!
SECOND MAYOR. You ought to be stoned!
HIDALGO. Am I so much of an hidalgo that I'm hated by peasants?
FIRST MAYOR. What do you think being an hidalgo is, having money and some
important position?
FIRST COUNCILMAN. You shouldn't get involved in such things now. Let's get
down to what's important.
FIRST MAYOR. Do you think that to be an hidalgo means giving your children
the title of don and dressing them in fine capes and caps?
SECOND COUNCILMAN. Sit down, I beg you, please.
HIDALGO. All right, I'll sit down, but unwillingly.
FIRST MAYOR. Why, what's the matter? What'll you catch from us? We're cleaner
than you are. (Más limpios somos que vos. You'll remember that purity of
blood islimpieza de sangre.)
SECOND COUNCILMAN. These hidalgos cansados, they consider us their
servants.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. I'll be damned if they know what work is here or in
Seville! Blessed guns, they're devouring us alive! SECOND COUNCILMAN. There are no
slaves like us country folk! Poor, downtrodden peasants! While the hidalgos run
everything and eat up everything!
FIRST COUNCILMAN. All right, all right. Shall we calm down, men? Let's all
sit down and talk about the reason for this meeting, so there'll not be a lesser
show of devotion in this procession than on previous occasions.
HIDALGO. What's all the fuss about? Do we have to do anything more than go
out to the shrine in good order, put the holy image on the altar and have the
priest say mass?
FIRST COUNCILMAN. Yes, but we will have to give some charity.
HIDALGO. What, what charity? Is it to be given to poor people, or what?
SECOND COUNCILMAN. The Council usually makes a donation to the local people.
. .and since it's not out of your pocket, stop worrying about it.
HIDALGO. Let everyone take his own lunch, the way I am.
SECOND COUNCILMAN. Look, the charity is to be given and nobody is going to butt in.
HIDALGO. Oh, what people I have to deal with!
SECOND COUNCILMAN. And what about the dances?
SECOND MAYOR. I bet he wants to cut them out too.
HIDALGO. Well, isn't it right to want to save money, to cut out any
unnecessary expense?
FIRST COUNCILMAN. You mean cut out the dances?
HIDALGO. That's right.
SECOND COUNCILMAN. Do you dance?
HIDALGO. I was never interested in that sort of thing.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. You know, you don't want to be happy. You're only
interested in paying for those floats and decorations that concern the Passion of
Christ, the stations of the Cross.
HIDALGO. And what's wrong with that? Isn't that what we're supposed to be commemorating?
FIRST COULCILMAN. I think, rather, that it's a ceremony in
which you're personally involved.
HIDALGO. You're a pig!
FIRST COUNCILMAN. I wish I were, so you'd not dare to eat me!
HIDALGO. You don't know what you're talking about.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. I wouldn't talk if I didn't know.
HIDALGO. That's what I get for coming to do honor to a bunch of peasants. I m
leaving so as not to dirty my hands.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. Why? Do you think I'm a piece of bacon and you don't want
to defile yourself ?
The hidalgo leaves in a huff, heading no doubt for the
nearest kosher delicatessen.
The scene continues with these defamatory, crowd-pleasing
comments by the two councilmen:
SECOND COUNCILMAN. Well, he's leaving all right.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. In fact, he's leaving the village.
SECOND COUNCILMAN. And he's pretty put out.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. It's typical of these people to be put out with everyone.
SECOND COUNCILMAN. They've got their sweet ways of arrogantly running
everything. Let the procession be arranged with dances and charity and let
him get back to the city with his defiled blood.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. Hidalgos! Tiresome people, all wrapped up in their phony honor!
SECOND COUNCILMAN. Don't get yourself in an uproar.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. An hidalgo has above his door some rusty old coat of arms
with six lances and a dart as a doubtful patent of nobility. And he'd like to
compare himself to someone who's got ten salt porks hanging up out there! Let's get out of here.
SECOND COUNCILMAN. Hidalgos are nothing but annoying stupid heads.
FIRST COUNCILMAN. Let there be crosses and banners; hidalgos don't make a
religious procession.
And with these words—surely a reminder of the Spanish
proverb: "Ni música en sermón, ni judío en procesión" ('No musicians at a sermon
and no Jews at a religious procession')—the scene ends.
One cannot help but admire Lope's extraordinary capacity to
create in this hidalgo a petit bourgeois, and by no means completely
repugnant, whose faith was purely formal, made up of empty gestures and
ludicrous monetary concerns, devoid of warmth and spirituality, while at the
same time offering to his receptive audience a compendium of anti-Semitic humor,
based on the most significant aspects of this less publicized, but no less
tragic, Spanish Civil War. (It should not be necessary to insist that the
mayors, councilmen and hidalgos cansados were all Spaniards.)
Lope de Vega, the Spanish dramatist
who authored SAN DIEGO DE ALCALÁ. |
What gave these peasants, these humble country dwellers, a
corner on Christianity and purity of blood is not too difficult to explain. A
hint is provided when the second councilman exclaims: "Let him get back to the
city with his defiled blood." It is a commonplace that the Jew is a city
dweller. As David Ben Gurion recently wrote: "The socio-economic structure of
the Jews in the diaspora differs from that of the people among whom they dwell.
The majority of every nation are farmers, laborers and workers. The number of
agricultural laborers among Jews—if there are any at all—is infinitely
small. Almost all Jews are city dwellers." It is for this reason that the
countryside was looked upon as the final refuge of purity of blood, a mystical
center of Hispanic perfection, unsullied by contact with Moors or Jews. By
extension, to be illiterate, to be without technical or scientific skills, was
some kind of guarantee that one was an Old, uncontaminated Christian. (Professor
Gabriel Jackson observed during the discussion period that Ben Gurion's claim was undoubtedly an exaggeration. There is substantive evidence in support of Professor Jackson's contention that the Jews
had considerable involvement in agriculture. Still, it is certain that they and,
particularly, the Conversos "were city dwellers, in the main." See
Abraham A. Neuman, The Jews in Spain (Philadelphia, 1944), I, 165-166.
For other references to the subject, see Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews
in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1966), 2 vols. (Index under Farmers and
Land ownership); Haim Beinart, "Hispano-Jewish Society," Journal of World
History, XI (1968), 220-238; Anita Novinsky, Cristãos novos na Bahia
(Sáo Paulo, 1972), pp. 25-26; Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History
(New York, 1971), p. 107; Joseph H. Silverman, "Some Aspects of Literature and
Life in the Golden Age of Spain," Estudios de literatura española ofrecidos a
Marcos A, Morínigo (Madrid, 1971), 133-170: p. 157, n. 27.)
This scene does more than provide a bit of local color. It
offers, rather, a well-planned, beautifully executed contrast with the life and
activities of San Diego de Alcalá himself. On one side we have the New
Christian, characterized—for Old Christian consumption—by shrewdness, business
know-how, heartless capitalism at its worst, cowardice, lukewarm faith, a
religion of convenience, and on the other San Diego himself, the quintessence of
Old Christian religious fervor, bravery, illiteracy, practicing a kind of
economía a lo divino—to use a wonderfully expressive phrase of Ramón Carande
in order to describe an economic system that had as its supreme ambition the
saving of souls. In this way San Diego de Alcalá, who works miracles of the
faith in contact with Moors, Christians, and Canarian barbarians, is in himself
the apotheosis of Old Christian values, those values that would prevail in the
Conquest of America, though not without fruitful competition from the values and
achievements of towering New Christian theologians and statesmen.
Let us see, briefly, how this is manifested in the main body
of the play and how it relates, in the process, to the other works we have
examined. Diego first appears on stage in peasant dress and immediately
impresses a hermit with his saintly simplicity mingled with wisdom. "I am," he
says, "un pobre villano." Elsewhere, he calls himself—and others do so as
well—"ignorante, idiota, pobre labrador." And yet, miracle of miracles, without
learning, without study, he understands and speaks Latin and explains subtle
nuances of theology.
In conversation with a Morisco who will ultimately embrace
Catholicism and renounce the infamous Mohammed, thanks to Diego's wondrous
achievements, he performs a favorite kind of "miracle"—
repeated in numerous comedias of historical
content—namely, he predicts a future event, an Hispano-Christian triumph, which
has already occurred in terms of real chronology. In other words, through Lope's
art of retrospective projection, Diego predicts what is for the audience a
glorious event from their past. "It may well be," he declares, "that some
saintly king—to whom Spain will owe more than to any monarch since Ferdinand the
First—will succeed in driving the Moors from Spain, so that tainted blood will
no longer poison the land." And, recalling Acuña's messianic dream of "one
flock, one shepherd, alone on earth," Diego—as he tills his land, baptizing not
watering his vegetables—will use an agricultural image closer to the peasant
life he knows: "God will unsheath his sword to cut down the contaminating weeds
that endanger the health of his wheat." As late as 1798 José Blanco White could
write that "if Saint Peter were Spanish he would either not admit individuals of
tainted blood into heaven or he would send them to some remote corner where they
would not offend the eyes of Old Christians."
When Diego is sent to the Canaries, he is ready to do battle
with the barbarians, to give his life for Christ, and we learn that he converts
many of them through his teachings and the inspiring example of his life. Thanks
to Diego, a thousand Spanish students a day are joining the Franciscan order and
their number has already reached 3800! (Spain's problems of underpopulation were
surely not divorced from such statistics!)
In the play which follows we see the dramatization of a
miracle or two in Diego's life, but let me offer a few examples of his
economía a lo divino, his divinely inspired solutions for the scarcity of
food. Like a God he creates ex nihilo, for "sin pan, vino y carne, sobra
vino, carne y pan," 'without bread, wine and meat, wine, meat and bread abound,'
to distribute among the poor. An apronful of breads that he steals from his
monastery for the sick and dying become bouquets of roses temporarily when he is
caught red-handed. In the play's final moment Fray Diego lies in state and a
young boy laments:
Father, oh father! He is dead!
I no longer have a father.
And my bread, Fray Diego?
Who will give it to me now?
From out of the coffin emerges Diego's arm and hands the
child a roll amid exclamations of Christian fervor and adoration: "A miracle, a
miracle! Even in death he was capable of heart-warming charity!"
Clearly there is something wonderfully wish-fulfilling for
Old Christians in the life and death of San Diego de Alcalá. And it is only
right that his name should live on in America; for in him there thrived
symbiotically the almost superhuman energy, bravery and determination of the
conquistador and the limitless compassion, humanity and evangelical zeal of
the missionary.
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