Cervantes Street (37 page)

Instead of continuing the composition of his narrative, my employer announced to me that he would now write the prologue of his
Don Quixote Part II,
which he subsequently rewrote endless times over the years. In essence, his prologue stated that his novel would be “less boastful and offensive to its readers” than the original; that Cervantes had no right to complain about “the profit I take away from his second part,” or be angry at Avellaneda for writing a second part because “there is nothing new about different persons pursuing the same story.” He cited in his defense the many
Amadices
that had been written; that he could never please Cervantes because it was well-known he was “as old as the Castle of Cervantes . . . and because of his advanced age . . . he had annoyed everybody and everything”; and that he excused the errors of Cervantes’s
Part I
because “it was written among people in prison” and everybody knows that prisoners are “gossipy, impatient, and short-tempered”; and finally, that his
Don Quixote Part II
, unlike Cervantes’s
Part I
, did “not teach lewdness but rather not to be crazy.”

I realized this spiteful man was not my superior, except in wealth. I never again used, at least not in my head, the honorary
Don
. It was understandable that he had become obsessed with the friend who betrayed him in his youth, but to write a book to destroy another man’s economic future, a man who was old, crippled, and poor, was something only a heartless Spanish aristocrat would do. It was an unpardonable sin.

He must have sensed that I was drawing away from him, because shortly after he had penned his prologue, at the end of one of our working days, he said: “Pascual, for a long time now you have proven to be a faithful friend, and I’m extremely grateful to you for your steadfastness during these years when so much tragedy has befallen me. You have given me every reason to trust you. But I must ask you never to mention the book I’m writing to anyone. Do I have your promise?”

“If it is any reassurance to Your Grace,” I quickly replied, “I swear on my mother’s memory that the secret will die with me.”

Soon after this exchange, Luis announced to me he had drafted a new last will and testament. “You are remembered most handsomely,” he told me. I had no reason to doubt the veracity of his words: he was immensely wealthy and had no close relatives or friends: his wife, Doña Mercedes, had died shortly after word got to Madrid of Friar Diego’s death. I understood this was his way of buying my unconditional allegiance, making sure I kept silent about his secret and remained his loyal accomplice.
I have sold my soul to the devil
, I thought.

Luis Lara was almost twenty years my senior. After the death of his son, he had lost interest in his appearance. Other than attending Sunday Mass, he rarely went out for a walk; left most of his food on his plate; spent hours praying on his knees in the chapel; slept but little; and had grown so thin his body would not have withstood a serious fall or illness. I couldn’t ask him about the nature of his bequest to me, but sometimes I would let my imagination carry me away, and I believed that, at his death, I would inherit his house with all its furnishings, in addition to the revenue of at least one of his vineyards. Also, there were those coffers in his chamber filled with gold escudos. Besides his valet Juan, no one knew about them. But Juan was so old and feeble-minded that I had no reason to fear anything from him. Until the moment of his death came, all I had to do was to please Luis, and wait with patience to become a wealthy gentleman, restored to the station of my ancestors. The day would come when the shield of the Paredes family replaced that of the Laras on the front door.

Luis continued working on his novel at his unhurried pace. When a new edition of
Don Quixote
appeared in 1608, he seemed unperturbed. His leisurely method of composition suited me fine. As long as I continued visiting the gambling houses, and tasting their exotic and forbidden African and Moorish delights, I was content.

* * *

As the years went by, and the popularity of
Don Quixote
grew, Luis’s obsession with Cervantes swelled. In 1609, when he heard that Cervantes had become a member of the Congregation of the Slaves of the Very Holy Sacrament, and that his wife and sisters had entered the Third Franciscan Order as novices, he scoffed: “If they think they are going to be less Jewish by becoming devout, it won’t work.”

The following year it was announced that Cervantes had traveled to Barcelona in the retinue of the count of Lemos, who had been appointed as viceroy of Naples. “If only the count knew!” Luis screamed as I delivered the news. “It is my fault, Pascual, because I should long ago have let the world know the kind of scoundrel Miguel de Cervantes is!”

His anger was placated when he heard that Cervantes had not joined the count in Naples and had instead returned to Madrid.

Don Luis at last finished his
Don Quixote Part II
. As he did not want anyone, even the eventual publisher, to know he was the creator, he authorized me to arrange for its publication. I was in the process of doing so when Cervantes announced that his
Exemplary Novels
would appear in 1613.

“Stop all negotiations regarding the publication of my
Don Quixote
. We will wait until next year,” he ordered me. “If I’ve waited this long, I can wait another year to show the world my superiority as a writer. Besides, when my novel appears, I don’t want another Spanish work to compete with it!”

By then, Cervantes was so famous that the public consumed the first edition of
The Exemplary Novels
in just a few weeks. Like everyone else, Luis read them. His verdict was: “They are not novels, Pascual. They read like plays. In any case, they are satirical, rather than exemplary. I would be wrong not to admit they are ingenious,” he conceded. “The one about the talking dogs is quite clever, though it rambles, like everything he writes. And his lack of knowledge of Latin is evident; his erudition a sham. He will always be an ignoramus!”

I had begun to think Luis would die before the publication of his novel. When it finally appeared in 1614, he was an old man. To my surprise, though his novel was vastly inferior to his rival’s—it lacked what Cervantes possessed in excess: genius!—the false
Don Quixote
became a success. Many readers were amused by it, and the first edition quickly sold out.

“Its success does not surprise me,” Luis boasted. “People can see I’m an artist of the highest order, not a vulgar one. Just to give you an example, instead of saying,
I took a shit
, as Miguel does in so many places in his crude novel, as if taking a shit were a worthy subject, I wrote:
The beehive that nature installed in my posterior distills wax
. You see the great difference, don’t you? What’s more, the adventures of my heroes are more noteworthy than those gathered and published by the writer of the first part.” Usually he could not bear to mention Cervantes’s name. “In addition, ‘The Desperate Rich Man’ and ‘The Happy Lovers,’ the tales within my
Don Quixote
, are wholly original and better written than the meandering, boring tales by the writer of
Part I
. Don’t you agree?”

I concurred, “It is as you say, Your Grace.”

* * *

Luis de Lara’s moment of glory was short-lived. The following year, after a ten-year hiatus, Cervantes published his own
Part II
. Like everyone else, I agreed (though I never mentioned this to Luis) that Cervantes had surpassed himself. What’s more, his novel exposed the shallowness of Luis’s, and dealt it a mortal blow. If Cervantes had not written
Part II
, I’m of the opinion that Luis’s novel might have survived as an oddity. Its lean style allowed the action to move faster than in Cervantes’s novel; though when it came to the depiction of Don Quixote and Sancho, Luis’s lack of empathy for other human beings exposed his true nature. Worse, he had not expected—I had not expected, no one had—that in Cervantes’s
Part II
, the crippled soldier of Lepanto would borrow the adventures and the characters created by Luis.

When he finished reading Cervantes’s
Part II
, Luis had an apoplectic fit. I found him in the library, collapsed on his chair, unconscious, a copy of Cervantes’s novel at his feet. The doctor was called. Though Luis was by then mostly skin and bones, he was bled until he turned the color of wax. But the will to live was strong in him, and after a few weeks he regained his strength and was able to speak. The first thing he whispered to me was: “Pascual, he wrote
Part I
without my help—although he stole the idea from me— but he could not have written his
Part II
without me. And he has the gall to steal my character Álvaro Tartuffe, and to mock my novel! My characters helped him to develop his own feeble creations.”

He looked so pathetic, so diminished, like an ancient child, that I wished he had died. Was it pity or revulsion I felt?

“Don Luis,” I said, “you shouldn’t try to speak too much. The doctor’s orders are that you must rest and eat nourishing meals. We can talk about everything when you’ve regained your strength.”

He attempted a smile that came across as a grimace. Then he grabbed me by the lapels of my vest. “I made him a great writer, Pascual,” he whispered in my ear. “I
compelled
him to write
Part II
.”

I thought:
What is unbearable for you to contemplate is that you were outsmarted; that Cervantes stole from the thief
. When Cervantes made references to Avellaneda’s
Quixote,
and inserted Avellaneda’s characters into his own story
,
he had linked his Quixote to Luis’s. Now the two characters (the real and the fake one) were Siamese twins. Cervantes had written a novel that joined the two of them forever.

Before long, the
Apocryphal
Don Quixote
(as it became known) was reviled and then forgotten. Luis spent his days praying, or in silence. He was a ghost in life. At night, he wandered down the halls of the great house in his nightshirt, barefoot, holding a burning taper and praying. One night I heard him imploring: “Help me to forgive, My Lord. Please help me to forgive him before I die.”

I had remained loyal because I knew his death was approaching, and I assumed I would come into my inheritance and would not have to work again for any man, aristocrat or not. Then, finally, it occurred to me to search his archives for his last will and testament. I was desperate to know exactly how rich I would be at his death. Luis, it turned out, had lied to me to buy my constancy: he had left all his money to his alma mater, to establish a chair in his name in perpetuity.

But I was not about to give up my nights in the gambling house, and the company of the children of the grandees of Spain whom I could address with the familiar
tú
, as if I were their equal. In less than a year, I practically emptied the coffers in Luis’s chambers. And I started to strip the grand mansion of everything of value: the paintings by the Italian and Flemish masters, the monumental medieval tapestries, the silverware, the gold plates, the furniture, the linen, the carpets, the old shields and lances and swords displayed on the walls. I sold everything to finance my nights of bliss. By then I was fifty years old, and I lived as a rich man.

The negative feelings I had harbored for Luis during all the years of my servitude had festered, until it poisoned every aspect of my life. If you’ve hated a person more than you have loved anyone else, the hate becomes a kind of love. Perhaps my hatred of Luis was the closest to love I had ever come. My need to destroy him was becoming as severe as his need to destroy Cervantes. I wanted to crush the man who had corrupted my soul; I wanted to twist his head and tear it from his neck. It would have given me great happiness to see him tortured by the Holy Office and then burned in a pyre. That he had been born rich and aristocratic was an accident; he could also have been born a mangy canine.

The formerly great house of the Laras was denuded of its splendors and overrun with rats. Luis’s old servant Juan was blind, but still tried to dress his master and serve him his meals. Juan was like an ancient dog that could barely crawl and yet refused to die out of loyalty to his master. And there was Maria Elena, the cook, who prepared the meals Luis didn’t touch. Her insalubrious children, who worked as servants and laborers and God knows what else, came by on an almost daily basis to be fed by her. They ate and drank and sang and danced in the kitchen, and stole whatever was left to sell or pawn.

At the beginning of 1616, I informed Luis that Cervantes had entered the Third Order of St. Francis. I expected him to say, “That will not make him any less a Jew!” But he said nothing; it was as if he had finally conceded defeat and was completely, irremediably annihilated. He had lost the feud. Cervantes was the undisputed victor.

One April morning, the news spread through Madrid that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the beloved and celebrated author of
Don Quixote de la Mancha
, was dying, and would be buried in the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians. After all the many years I had deferred to Luis Lara—“Yes, Don Luis,” “Of course, Your Grace,” “As you say, Your Eminence,” “Kiss your ass? Lick your feet? Eat your shit? Of course, of course, of course, Your Worship”; the years when I obeyed his every command, was at his beck and call, the years of my humiliating servitude—the moment I had been waiting for had finally arrived.

I mentioned to Luis the approaching demise of his archenemy, and the news put him in a good mood. It was a sunny spring afternoon. I asked him if he would like to go out for a stroll. The body that just a few hours earlier had been as stiff as a mummy’s was now filled with energy. At the end of his block on Lara Street, I stopped and pretended to see the new sign for the first time.

“Why have you stopped, Pascual?”

I raised my arm in the direction of the new tiles adorning the corner. Fate works in mysterious ways. Lara Street, for centuries the name of the street where the Lara house stood, had been renamed Cervantes Street.