“Well,” said the young man, “Madrid really is a small world.”
It certainly was. Only the previous morning, he and Captain Alatriste, ignorant of each other’s names, had fought a duel together. Even more remarkable, as everyone was about to discover, this young fighter’s name was Lopito Félix de Vega Carpio and he was the poet’s son, newly arrived in Madrid from Sicily, where he had served under the Marquis of Santa Cruz, having enlisted in the galleys when he was just fifteen. He was the illegitimate child—albeit acknowledged by Lope—from the latter’s affair with the actress Micaela Luján; he had fought against Berber pirates, done battle with the French off the Îles d’Hyères, and taken part in the liberation of Genoa, and now he was in Madrid, hoping to sort out the papers that would confirm him in the rank of ensign. He was also, it turned out, keeping watch on a certain lady’s window. Anyway, this present situation was damnably awkward. While Lopito gave a detailed account of what had happened, his bewildered father sat in his chair, his ecclesiastical gown still sprinkled with crumbs, and looked from one to the other, not knowing whether to be surprised or angry. Once recovered from their initial shock, Captain Contreras and don Francisco de Quevedo argued the case with reason and tact; my master, however, greatly upset, offered his apologies and made ready to leave at once, convinced that he would no longer be welcome in that house. Quevedo was saying:
“The boy is, in fact, to be congratulated. Crossing swords with the best blade in Madrid and coming away with only a scratch is either a mark of skill or very good luck.”
Captain Contreras confirmed that this was so and gave further evidence. He and Diego Alatriste had been in Italy together, and he knew that the only reason Alatriste ever failed to dispatch an opponent was because he chose not to. This and other arguments continued to be exchanged, but my master was still preparing to leave. He courteously bowed to Lope, gave his word that he would never have unsheathed his sword had he known his adversary to be Lope’s son, and then turned to go before Lope could say a word. At this point, Lopito de Vega intervened.
“Please, Father, allow the gentleman to stay,” he said.
He bore him no ill feeling at all, because he had fought like a true hidalgo right from the start.
“And although that last knife-thrust may not have been exactly elegant—well, so few are—he didn’t just leave me there like a dog. He bandaged my wound and was kind enough to send someone to fetch me and take me to a barber.”
These dignified words calmed the situation. The father of the wounded man ceased frowning; Quevedo, Contreras, and Prado all praised the young ensign’s discretion, which said much for himself and his purity of blood; Lopito described the incident in more detail this time and in jovial terms; and the conversation resumed its friendly tone, thus dissipating the heavy clouds that had been threatening to spoil that postprandial gathering and bring down Lope’s displeasure on my master, something that the latter would have keenly regretted, for he was a great admirer of Lope and respected him as he did few men. Finally, the captain accepted a glass of sweet Málaga wine, concurred with everything the others had said, and Lopito and he became firm friends. They would remain so for eight years, until ensign Lope Félix de Vega Carpio met his unhappy fate when he drowned after his ship was wrecked on an expedition to Île Sainte-Marguerite. I will, however, have occasion to say more about him in this story, and possibly in a future episode, too, if I ever recount the role played by Lopito, Captain Alatriste, and myself, along with other comrades—some of whom you have met already and others whom you have not—in the attack on Venice launched by the Spanish for the second time in the century—an attempt to take the city and murder the doge and his cronies, who had given us so much trouble in the Adriatic and in Italy by ingratiating themselves with the pope and with Richelieu. But all in good time. Besides, Venice merits a book to itself.
We continued our pleasant conversation in the garden until late into the afternoon, and took advantage of this opportunity to observe Lope de Vega close to. I had met him once on the steps of San Felipe, when I was a young lad newly arrived in Madrid, and he had placed his hand on my head, almost as if in an act of confirmation. I imagine it must be difficult now to grasp just what an important figure the great Lope was in those days. He must have been about sixty-four then, and he still had a very gallant air about him, enhanced as it was by his elegant gray locks and his trim mustache and beard, which he continued to wear despite his clerical habit. He was a discreet man who spoke little, smiled a great deal, and sought to please everyone, and who concealed behind impeccable courtesy his pride at having reached such an enviable position. No one—apart from Calderón—enjoyed such fame in his lifetime, writing plays of a beauty, variety, and richness that were unequaled in Europe. He had been a soldier in his youth, seen action in a naval battle in the Azores, in Aragon, and in the war against England, and at the time of which I am speaking, he had written a good part of the more than one thousand five hundred plays and four hundred sacramental dramas that flowed from his pen. His status as a priest did not prevent him enjoying a long and scandalous life full of amorous intrigues, lovers, and illegitimate children, all of which meant, understandably enough, that despite his great literary reputation, he was never seen as a particularly virtuous man and so received none of the courtly benefits to which he aspired, such as the post of royal chronicler, which he always sought but never attained. Otherwise, he enjoyed both fame and fortune. And unlike good don Miguel de Cervantes, who died, as I said, poor, alone, and forgotten, Lope’s funeral, nine years after the dates that concern us here, was a multitudinous display of homage such as had never before been seen in Spain. As for the basis for his reputation, much has been written about that, and I commend those books to the reader. I later had occasion to travel to England and learn the English tongue. I read and even saw performances of plays by William Shakespeare, and I would say that although the Englishman could plumb the depths of the human heart, and while his characters are perhaps more complex than Lope’s, the Spaniard’s sheer theatrical skill, inventiveness, and ability to keep an audience on tenterhooks, the brilliance of his intrigues and the captivating way in which each plot evolves are all incomparable. And even when it comes to characters, I’m not sure that the Englishman always succeeded in depicting the doubts and anxieties of lovers, or the crafty machinations of servants as ingeniously as Lope. Consider, if you will, his little-known work The Duke of Viseu and tell me if that tragic play is not the equal of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Moreover, if it is true that Shakespeare’s plays were in some way so universal that we can all recognize ourselves in them—only Don Quixote is as Spanish as Lope and as universal as Shakespeare—it is no less true that Lope, with his new approach to drama, held up a very faithful mirror to the Spain of our century, and that his plays were imitated everywhere, thanks to the fact that Spanish, then, was a language that bestrode two worlds, a language admired, read, and spoken by everyone. However, it must be said, too, that this was due in no small measure to the fact that it was also the language of our fearsome troops and our arrogant, black-clad ambassadors. Unlike other nations—and in this I happily include that of Shakespeare—only Spain has left such a clear record of its customs, values, and language, and all thanks to the plays of Lope, Calderón, Tirso, Rojas, Alarcón, and their ilk, which made such a lasting impression on the theaters of the world. At a time when Spanish was being spoken in Italy, Flanders, the Indies, and the remote seas of the Philippines, the Frenchman Corneille was imitating the work of Guillén de Castro in order to find success in his own land, and the land of Shakespeare was home only to a bunch of hypocritical pirates in search of excuses to prosper and, like so many others, nipping at the heels of the weary, old Spanish lion, who was, nonetheless, still capable of far greater things than they ever were. To quote Lope: