CHAPTER V
THE LIFE OF CERVANTES
Some men live their romances, and some men write them. It was given to Cervantes to do both, and, as his art was not of the impersonal order, it is scarcely possible to read his work without a desire to know more of the rich and imposing individuality which informs it. Posthumous legends are apt to form round men of the heroic type who have been neglected while alive, and posterity seems to enjoy this cheap form of atonement. Cervantes is a case in point. But the researches of the last few years have brought much new material to light, and have dissipated a cloud of myths concerning him: we are not yet able to see him as he was at every stage of his chequered career, but we are nearer him than we ever were before. We are passing out of the fogs of fable, and are learning that, in Cervantes’s case, facts are as strange as fiction—and far more interesting.
It is a foible with the biographers of great men to furnish their heroes with a handsome equipment of ancestors, and Cervantes’s descent has been traced back to the end of the tenth century by these amateur genealogists. We may admire their industry, and reject their conclusions. It is quite possible that Cervantes was of good family, but we cannot go further back than two generations. His grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, appears to have been a country lawyer who died, without attaining distinction or fortune, about the middle of the sixteenth century. Juan’s son was Rodrigo de Cervantes who married Leonor de Cortinas: and the great novelist was the fourth of their seven children. Rodrigo de Cervantes was a lowly precursor of Sangrado—a simple apothecary-surgeon, of inferior professional status, seldom settled long in one place, earning a precarious living by cupping and blistering. His son Miguel was born at Alcalá de Henares—possibly, as his name suggests, on St. Michael’s Day (September 29)—and he was baptized there on Sunday, October 9, 1547, in the church of Santa María la Mayor. There was a tradition that Cervantes matriculated at Alcalá, and his name was discovered in the university registers by an investigator who looked for it with the eye of faith. This is one of many pleasing, pious legends. Rodrigo de Cervantes was not in a position to send his sons to universities. A poor, helpless, sanguine man, he wandered in quest of patients and fortune from Alcalá to Valladolid, from Valladolid to Madrid, from Madrid to Seville, and it has been conjectured that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra spent some time in the Jesuit school at Seville. The dog Berganza, in the Coloquio de los Perros, recalls his edification at ‘seeing the loving-kindness, the discretion, the solicitude and the skill with which those saintly fathers and masters taught these lads, so that the tender shoots of their youth should not be twisted, nor take a wrong bend in the path of virtue which, together with the humane letters, they continually pointed out to them.’ But it is evident that Cervantes can have had little formal schooling. He was educated in the university of practical experience, and picked up his learning as he could.
He made the most of his casual opportunities. Obviously the man who wrote Don Quixote must have read the books of chivalry, the leading poets, the chronicles, dramatic romances like the Celestina, picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes, pastoral tales like the Diana, the cancioneros, and countless broadsides containing popular ballads; and he must have read them at this time, for his maturer years were spent in campaigning, or in the discharge of petty, exacting duties. In his early youth, too, he made acquaintance with the theatre, witnessing the performances of the enterprising Lope de Rueda, actor, manager and playwright, the first man in Spain to set up a travelling booth, and bid for public support. The impression was ineffaceable: from Cervantes’s account of his experience, given half a century later, it may be gathered that he listened and watched with the uncritical rapture of a clever, ardent lad, and that his ambition to become a successful dramatist was born there and then. In the meantime, while following his father in his futile journeys, he received a liberal education. Jogging along the high-road, lodging in wayside inns, strolling in market-places, he met men and women of all ranks, from nobles to peasants, and thus began to hoard his literary capital.
Like most young men of literary ambition, Cervantes began by versifying, and, as he never grew old in heart, he versified as long as he lived. A sonnet, written between 1560 and 1568, has come to light recently, and is interesting solely as the earliest extant work of Cervantes. By 1566 he was settled in Madrid, and two years later he wrote a series of elegiacs on the death of the Queen, Isabel de Valois: these were published in a volume edited by Juan López de Hoyos, a Madrid schoolmaster, who refers to Cervantes as his ‘dear and beloved pupil.’ As the pupil was twenty before López de Hoyos’s school was founded, the meaning of the phrase is obscure. Perhaps Cervantes had been a pupil under López de Hoyos elsewhere: perhaps he was an usher in López de Hoyos’s new school: frankly, we know nothing of his circumstances. He makes his formal entry into literature, and then vanishes out of sight, and apparently out of Spain. What happened to him at this time is obscure. We know on his own statement that he was once camarero to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva; we know that Acquaviva, not yet a Cardinal, was in Madrid during the winter of 1568, and that he started for Rome towards the end of the year; and we know from documentary evidence that Cervantes was in Rome at the end of the following year. How he got there, how and when he entered Acquaviva’s service, or when and why he left it—these, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, are all ‘matters of probable conjecture.’
While Cervantes was in Rome, a league was forming by Spain, Venice and the Holy See against the Sultan Selim: war was in sight, and every high-spirited young Spaniard in Italy must have felt that his place was in the ranks. It has been thought that Cervantes served as a supernumerary before he joined Acquaviva’s household; but we do not reach solid ground till 1571 when Cervantes is discovered as a soldier in a company commanded by Diego de Urbina, ‘a famous captain of Guadalajara,’ as the Captive in Don Quixote called him thirty-four years later. Urbina’s company belonged to the celebrated tercio of Miguel de Moncada, and in September 1571 it was embarked at Messina on the Marquesa, one of the galleys under the command of Don John of Austria. At dawn on Sunday, October 7, Don John’s armada lay off the Curzolarian Islands when two sail were sighted on the horizon, and soon afterwards the Turkish fleet followed. Cervantes was ill with fever, but refused to listen to his comrades who begged him to stay below: death in the service of God and the King, he said, was preferable to remaining under cover. The Marquesa was in the hottest of the fight at Lepanto, and when the battle was won Cervantes had received three wounds, two in the chest, and one in the left hand. Like most old soldiers, he loved to fight his battles over again, and, to judge from his writings, he was at least as proud of having been at Lepanto as of creating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
He was in hospital for seven months at Messina, received an increase of pay, and returned to duty in April 1572. This throws light upon a personal matter. Current likenesses of Cervantes, all imaginary and most of them mere variants of the portrait contrived in the eighteenth century by William Kent, usually represent him as having lost an arm. This is manifestly wrong: a one-armed private would have been discharged as not worth his pay and rations. Cervantes was appointed to Manuel Ponce de León’s company in the tercio of Lope de Figueroa—the vehement martinet who appears in Calderón’s Alcalde de Zalamea—and took part in three campaigns; he was present at the fiasco of Navarino in 1572, at the occupation of Tunis in 1573, and at the attempted relief of the Goletta in 1574. He had already done garrison duty in Genoa and Sardinia, and was now stationed successively at Palermo and Naples. It was clear that there was to be no more fighting for a while, and, as there was no opening for Cervantes in Italy, he determined to seek promotion in Spain. Don John of Austria recommended him for a company in one of the regiments then being raised for Italy, and laid stress upon his ‘merits and services,’ and a similar recommendation was made by the Duke of Sesa, Viceroy of Sicily. These flattering credentials and testimonials were destined to cause much embarrassment and suffering to the bearer; but they encouraged him to make for Spain with a confident heart.
His optimism was to be put to the proof. On September 26, 1575, the Sol, with Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo on board, was separated from the rest of the Spanish squadron in the neighbourhood of Les Saintes Maries near Marseilles, and was captured by Moorish pirates. The desperate resistance of the Spaniards was unavailing; they were overcome by superior numbers and were carried off to Algiers. What follows would seem extravagant in a romance of adventures, but the details are supported by irrefragable evidence. As Algiers was at this time the centre of the slave-trade, the prisoners cannot have felt much doubt as to what was in store for them. Cervantes’s first owner was a certain Dali Mami, a Greek renegade, and captain of a galley. He read the recommendatory letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sessa, and (not unnaturally) jumped at the conclusion that he had drawn a prize: his slave might not be of great use so far as manual labour was concerned, but any one who was personally acquainted with two such personages as Don John and the Duke must presumably be a man of consequence, and would assuredly be worth a heavy ransom. The first result of this fictitious importance was that Cervantes was put in irons, and chains; and, when these were at last removed, he was carefully watched.
Cervantes found means to baffle his sentries. His first attempt to escape was made in 1576: it was an ignominious failure. He and his fellow-prisoners set out on foot to walk to Orán, the nearest Spanish outpost; their Moorish guide played them false, and there was nothing for it but to go back to Algiers. In 1577 Rodrigo de Cervantes was ransomed—he was reckoned cheaper than his brother—and he undertook to send a vessel to carry off Miguel and his friends. Meanwhile Cervantes enlisted the sympathies of a Spanish renegade, a gardener from Navarre named Juan; between them they dug out a cave in a garden near the sea, and smuggled into it one by one fourteen Christian slaves who were secretly fed during several months with the help of another renegade from Melilla, a scoundrel known as El Dorador. It is easier to say that the scheme was a bad one than to suggest anything better: it was within an ace of succeeding. The vessel sent by Rodrigo de Cervantes drew near the shore on September 28, and was on the point of embarking those hidden in the cave when a Moorish fishing-boat passed by and scared the crew, who stood out to sea again. A second attempt at a rescue was made, but it was too late. The plot had been revealed by El Dorador to Hassan Pasha, the Dey of Algiers, and, when some of the crew landed to convey the fugitives on board, the garden was surrounded by Hassan’s troops. The entire band of Christians was captured, and Cervantes at once avowed himself the sole organiser of the conspiracy. Brought bound before Hassan, he adhered to his statement that his comrades were innocent, and that he took the entire responsibility for the plot. The gardener was hanged; after some hesitation, Hassan decided to spare Cervantes’s life, and finally bought him from Dali Mami for five hundred crowns.