Abstract
Index editor
The author Ariel Dorfman
“My master’s thesis was on Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies, and my explorations of innocence and nature, corruption and imagination, would serve me in good stead. Many ideas in that thesis were central to the critique of Disney and American innocence in my text from 1971, How to Read Donald Duck.”
The Argentinean/Chilean/American playwright said Shakespeare and Cervantes had been his constant companions for much of his life.
“In the last years, I have written a play and a novel about Cervantes, and published several pieces on Shakespeare, exploring his relevance for our contemporary dilemmas, as well as preparing a play about Caliban,” said the writer, whose work has been performed in more than 100 countries.
“The fact that they are the greatest writers in the two languages that reside in me, the two writers that most formed my own explorations of those languages and literary traditions, encouraged me to possibly join them in some way. I even recently wrote two Shakespearean sonnets where they communicate from beyond the grave, but only last year, during the fourth centenary commemorations of their (almost) simultaneous deaths, did I realise that I could have them meet in a long complex tale.”
In the story below, published for the first time, he looks at how Shakespeare and Cervantes could have met, and under which circumstances. The story turns into a mini spy thriller.
In an interview with Index, Dorfman explained why: “Having decided that they should meet, it was a matter of figuring out how it might have happened historically, and [making] sure that the moment they crossed paths would be fraught with peril, as I was aware that both Shakespeare and Cervantes lived in societies filled with the sort of terror that my wife and I, our family, country and Latin American continent, suffered: torture, persecution of dissidence, censorship, surveillance.”
He added that he needed an intermediary to bring the two together and he chose “a spy worthy of John Le Carré trying to survive in Renaissance Europe, with a Borges twist, because that interpreter’s existence is discovered in archives by someone (obsessed like I am) with a meeting between Will and Miguel, which allows the story itself to be a meeting place of fiction and reality, imagination and history – the very themes probed by Hamlet and Don Quixote.
“I had read a bit about Shakespeare’s life, and an enormous amount about Cervantes, and decided to bring them together in Valladolid in 1605. Cervantes was there, famous (though poor) after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, and it was not impossible that Shakespeare would have travelled to that city, then the capital of Imperial Spain, as part of Lord Howard’s entourage.”
Dorfman often writes about censorship, corruption and violence against the individual. The playwright worked for Chilean President Salvador Allende at the time of the coup, and escaped torture and death only by luck. His close friend and colleague Claudio Jimeno, with whom he swapped shifts so he could see his son, was therefore on duty when the coup happened – something that Dorfman has written about in detail.
The playwright has long been a supporter of Index’s work to challenge censorship and publish banned writers, and allowed Index on Censorship magazine to publish Death and the Maiden ahead of any other publication.
The play, of course, won the Laurence Olivier award, and went on to be performed around the world.
Saving Will and Miguel
It is a question that has obsessed me since I was a boy, since my dad pointed out that the two towering literary giants of their age had died on the same date in late April of 1616 and yet had never so much as looked each other in the face.
Except that they did, I have spent most of my life searching for proof that they did indeed cross paths, though spent may not be the right word. Consumed, wrung dry, my life has been depleted by this manic quest, leaving me bereft of lovers, family, friends. Nothing could stop me, no scorn from scholars or ridicule from experts who professed that not a scrap of evidence had ever turned up about any such encounter. I went on and on, as if possessed, looking for a clue in every play and book of that era, every church registry and lawsuit and wisp of correspondence, a clue, a hint, an intimation, asthmatic from so much dust and mould, eyes exhausted from so much squinting, possessed, yes, I became convinced that I was being urged on by Cervantes and Shakespeare from beyond the grave, they were the ones who wanted the world to know what had happened that day or night or afternoon or dawn when they had exchanged words and jokes and mutual praise, they had chosen me to be the intermediary for what, when it materialised out of the mists of history, would be a startling revelation.
And the revelation, now that it has come, is startling indeed.
That meeting saved their lives.
According to two letters that have just surfaced, that I ferreted out of a forgotten vault in the endless archives of the castle of Simancas in Spain, both letters penned on the same day, June 18th, 1605, and stemming from the same city, Valladolid, and composed by the same duplicitous hand of one person.
Eduardo Villa Mason.
Over the last few years I had been keeping an eye open on that interpreter for the court of the Spanish King Felipe III, ever since I had accidentally stumbled upon his name attached to a 1603 voucher for one thousand ducats among mountains of unexplored papers of Lord High Admiral Charles Howard, First Earl of Nottingham. The hero of the Invincible Armada in 1588 and ravager of Cadiz eight years later, he had been chief negotiator and diplomat for Elizabeth and her successor James I. And he paid one thousand ducats to a Spanish subject! To a petty translator? There was no way around it: Villa Mason was spying for the English. A conclusion corroborated as I tracked him down day after day, rummaging for traces of his existence, persuaded that he held the key to that meeting between Cervantes and Shakespeare.
He had, as an interpreter, accompanied the Spanish envoy Juan de Tassis, Conde de Villamediano, to England in 1603 to negotiate the terms of a peace treaty with Lord Howard. Was it not possible that during that visit, which had lasted almost two years, Villa Mason, an aspiring playwright himself, had become acquainted with Shakespeare? And did historical records not show that when Lord Howard journeyed to Valladolid in June of 1605 to ratify that treaty and attend the baptism of the recently born son of the Spanish monarch, he had brought with him four hundred gentlemen, with a strong probability that one of them was Shakespeare, who was one of the Lord Chamberlain’s men? Was not Cervantes, after a life of neglect and misfortune, then the most popular writer of his land, having just published the first part of Don Quixote? And what about a receipt from mid-June 1605, that I had scrabbled from the archives of the Holy Brotherhood in Toledo, attesting that Villa Mason, now back in Valladolid, had again received a hefty sum, fifty escudos de oro this time, from none other than Fray Bocanegra, the eminence noir of the Inquisition? Payment, I guessed, for information about Cervantes, or Shakespeare, or both? If they had met, and neither knew the other’s language, they needed an interpreter, didn’t they?
Oh yes, they needed him, but less to translate for them than to save their skin, rescue their bodies from torture and probable execution, a looming threat that these two authors knew nothing about.
Here, published for the first time in its entirety, is his first letter, directed to Lord Howard.
Valladolid, June 18th, 1605
This will be the final report on William Shakespeare.
As he departs today for London with you and your retinue, and I inevitably remain behind in this city of Valladolid, I will no longer have access to his person or the ability to continue informing you about his activities and true beliefs. When, almost exactly two years ago I arrived at your court in England along with my patron, Juan de Tassis, I dared to offer my assistance to you and you were gracious enough to accept me into your network.
The task assigned to me was to confirm or dispel, once and for all, the rumours of Catholic recusancy and foreknowledge of plots against King James swirling around the figure of a certain William Shakespeare, a playwright then unknown to me.
Let me freely admit, my Lord, that while frequenting Shakespeare’s company in London, I came to admire the intensity of his verse and complexity of his plays. Rather than stand in the way of my plans, this familiarity with his tragedies and comedies made my fawning approach to him seem more sincere, easier to form a lasting affection on his part. At my insistence, Your Lordship did include Shakespeare among your Ambassadorial cortege as a groom at Somerset House, to wait upon Juan de Tassis. It was there that I began to press him to accompany your Excellency on the upcoming visit to feverish Spain, where I knew I would be able, far from his native land, to truly tempt him. He was not easily persuadable, being loath to leave England now that he was looking to conclude a major purchase of land in his native Stratford that would establish him as a gentleman and eminent stake-holder of the county he had left penniless twenty years earlier. But I was able to use my forked tongue – or was it covered with honey? - to convince my friend: “What, Will, is it not better to see other lands? What, is it not prudent to escape the plague that is raging in London? What” – and here was the clincher – “do you not wish to meet the great Cervantes – “whose Don Quixote’s early chapters in manuscript I had been translating for his ears only -”are you not enamored of the story of Cardenio and eager therefore to make the acquaintance of someone who may be able to purvey you with yet more tales to filch and filter?” And to make sure that my silver words were accompanied by silver of another sort, I told him that in Spain I knew someone interested in staging his plays in Madrid, willing to purvey the funds he still lacked to wind up the Stratford land deal. “I have spent the last two years translating your work into Castilian, dear Will, how can you not reward my devotion with a slight snip of your own time?”
And so he came. I did not mind that he was maddeningly cautious all the time. I had set up a meeting with Miguel de Cervantes and anticipated that, as soon as I got them both drunk, Shakespeare’s defenses would be breached.
They bonded instantly, at the very door of the derelict Cervantes house, in the Calle del Rastro. After the formal introductions had been made, they joked about a certain libertine noble called Don Gaspar de Ezpeleta who, during the recent festivities, had fallen from his horse trying to lance a bull. Shakespeare conjectured that the buffoon must have few progeny if his aim was so bad as to miss such a large target, Cervantes responding that in the dark perhaps Don Gaspar’s puntería got better the closer his punta was to the puta awaiting him in who knows what bed, puns that I contentedly translated and celebrated. Not all was gaiety during their hours together. They both complained about taxes and the abominable behavior of those who printed their works. And literary queries abounded. Shakespeare was interested in the captivity Cervantes endured in Algiers due to a recent play of his with a moor as protagonist, while Cervantes wished to know particulars about court customs in Shakespeare’s land, as he was working on a story about a Catholic girl kidnapped during the raids of your very Lordship on Cádiz many years ago and taken to England where she is favoured by Queen Elizabeth. Next the conversation turned to the theatre. By then we had repaired to the rowdy Taverna del Mentidero. Cervantes was fascinated by young boys on the English stage portraying women and Shakespeare was more than fascinated by the freedom, licentiousness was the word he employed, of Spanish women to portray their own sex for all to feast their eyes on. “What you gain in verisimilitude,” he said, “you may lose in ambivalence and tension.” Oh there was much chatter about mirrors and ambiguity and the evanescence of life, much back and forth about childhood memories.
Never an occasion, however, to fathom Shakespeare’s genuine feelings on religion or the limits of loyalty. Until, finally, as dawn arrived on this day when I knew he would be departing – in fact, he must be packing as I write this report – I decided to risk it all on one gambit. He had drunk himself out of his five senses and was therefore as open as he would ever be to my tender mercies, so when he asked me, aggressively, where the devil was that Spaniard who wanted to stage his plays for a fat figure, I took him aside, so Cervantes would not witness the transaction and dangled a bag of coins in front of Master Shakespeare’s bleary eyes. “Nobody knows this, nobody needs to know this,” I whispered to him. “All I require is that when a man whose name I will provide contacts you upon your return to England you report to him from time to time the movements of the King and his Court. You have access and you have opportunity and you have that land that awaits the last ducats to be completely in your hands, and, above all, William, you have the desire, deep inside, to favour the cause of the true religion of Christ our Saviour.”
I waited for his reaction.
He slapped me. My face. Once and then again, and would have drawn his sword if Cervantes had not remarked upon our altercation, shuffled over and stayed his hand. “Gentlemen, we are not off the coast of Flanders, fighting battles that lead nowhere! I have been to war, I have lost the use of this left arm, I will not see two good men hurt each other. As if we did not hurt each other enough in this life.”
And there you have it. Your Lordship asked for proof. I already gave you a brief summary this very morning and now offer you all the details in writing, just as you requested. The proof of William Shakespeare’s innocence lies in my cheeks, reddened by the harsh fingers that wrote As You Like It and created Falstaff, fingers that would never conspire, just as mine would not, against his Majesty King James. Shakespeare has been maligned, sir, and I beg you to cross him off the list of suspects of treason and Papist sympathies.
And beg you, as well, to see if it is possible to renew my contract. I know that this is a time of peace and transition, when many believe it is necessary to reduce expenses better disbursed on the health of the people and the wealth of the republic, but it is precisely now, when England is letting its guard down and villainous plans most hide themselves behind smiles, that information about your adversaries is more indispensable than ever.
I await further instructions from Your Excellency, who surely knows I can be completely trusted.
Eduardo Villa Mason, interpreter.
So there it is.
The accusations against Shakespeare were not negligible.
That he, like his father and so many in his family and among his friends, was still covertly devoted to Catholicism, that he had foreknowledge of the sedition by the executed Earl of Essex against the late Queen and, of course, closeness to his patron, the disgraced Southampton who had just been released from the Tower, after several years of imprisonment. But nothing compared to the threat Shakespeare was to confront less than five months after Eduardo writes his report.
On November 5th 1605, the Gunpowder Plot is discovered in London, a conspiracy by Guy Fawkes and other Catholics to blow up King James, his ministers and all of parliament. Many of the schemers were associated, in various and damning ways, with Shakespeare, including his neighbours in Stratford. Scholars have often wondered how the Bard dodged the widespread persecution against those who were guilty as well as those who were clearly innocent, how he avoided even being interrogated when so many close to him were imprisoned, tortured until they confessed and then executed. I am convinced that the testimony from the Spanish spy charged with entrapping our playwright was invoked by Lord Howard in order to spare his favourite author and gentleman in waiting. The fact that he had refused money from a Catholic envoy of the Spanish monarch certainly would have weighed heavily in our playwright’s favour at a time of generalised paranoia.
That first letter, that has been certified as authentic by three renowned documentarians, experts in Jacobean manuscripts, does not only therefore prove that Shakespeare met Cervantes but that without that meeting there would have been no Macbeth, no Lear, no Winter’s Tale, nor would Prospero have been afforded the chance to weave his magic with the mischievous Ariel at his beck and call, nor bid us all farewell. Incredibly, the spy who was supposed to incriminate the Bard ended up so enthralled with him, could we venture so in love with the person and the works or both, that he preferred to shield the author of Hamlet rather than line his own pockets with mercenary gold.
What makes the case even more extraordinary is that, in a second letter, Eduardo Villa Mason then proceeds to perform the same rescue operation for the author of Don Quixote. This one, dated the same June 18th, 1605, is directed to someone, though unnamed, we deduct was the baleful Fray Bocanegra who must have been brooding for many years about Cervantes, suspected of humanist sympathies for Erasmus of Rotterdam. Furthermore, an affidavit by a certain Fray Juan de Blanco Paz, an informant for the Inquisition who had spent five years in captivity with Cervantes in Algiers, claimed that this “soldier crippled at the battle of Lepanto” had survived thanks to his friendship with the Muslims and renegades who had captured him, friendly relations that implied, as well, that he had engaged in the sin, punishable by death, of sodomy.
Even so, Cervantes had been, for most of his life, a small fish, a failure at everything he had tried his hand at. If Bocanegra suddenly enlisted Eduardo Villa Mason as a snitch, it was due to the unexpected success of Don Quixote, published and reprinted many times that very year of 1605. This upstart Miguel had become somewhat of a celebrity, with increased access, thanks to his literature, to the most powerful potentates of the kingdom. No matter that he continued to subsist in utter misery – he had bobbed up into the public eye and it was time to deal with him in one way or the other.
And Eduardo deals with him indeed, as the second letter, composed in Spanish but translated to the best of my ability into English, attests. But not in the way Bocanegra would have expected.
Valladolid, June 18th, 1605
Your Grace:
This will be my first report on Miguel de Cervantes. It will also, alas, be my last one.
Your initial assignment for me last month, upon my return from London with Ambassador Juan de Tassis, was to confirm or not the serious allegations against Miguel de Cervantes. Despite the pleasure his Don Quixote has afforded me, I was as shocked as you and other members of the Holy Brotherhood by how the protagonist, the madman Don Quixote, tears his shirt and uses the shreds to fashion a rosary in order to do penance for his non-existent lady Dulcinea. A disturbing episode, if we also note that the fraudulent Knight and his Squire never confess or attend mass.
Not so difficult, I mused, to investigate whether the dossier you handed me was true or false. My proximity to Cervantes over this last month, and the lavishing of large meals and a few loans to cover his latest gambling debts, nevertheless failed to render up any damning information. On the contrary, whenever the subject was broached, he steadfastly professed the purest Catholic doctrine, without a hint of apostasy and certainly not a word that could be construed as suggesting disloyalty to our pious King Felipe III.
How, then, to crack his façade?
The occasion was the visit of the terrifying Lord Howard to this city. Among his retainers was a playwright, a certain Guillermo Shakespeare, of whom neither you nor anyone else in Spain has any knowledge, but whom I had become acquainted during my recent stay in England, an author I had praised to Cervantes. By arranging for the two to meet I hoped to catch the conscience of our target, as long as I could get this Shakespeare, a heavy drinker, to persuade his fellow writer, who tends to drink only water (“if I could drink an ocean,” Cervantes had told me morosely, “I would not be satisfied, something is wrong with me,”) to join him in carousing across town.
My plan prospered only insofar as Cervantes did, indeed, end up inebriated, forgetting his dropsy as his new friend Guillermo, an infectiously charming fellow, began to quaff down many bottles of our more expensive Andalusian wines, a receipt for which is attached to this report. And as Cervantes was less accustomed to such tipsiness, he more readily lost all inhibitions, allowing me to pry his mind and heart open as if I were a knife and he a slab of meat.
I regret to report that there is not the slightest foundation for any of the aspersions cast upon the honor of such a devout Catholic and faithful subject of His Majesty. Regret, I insist, because you did strongly insinuate that if I did come across any incriminatory evidence, my fee would be doubled. But I have sworn on the Holy Bible to tell the truth. So that you may verify his innocence, I transcribe some of the innocuous drivel that transpired during the interminable conversation between the two scribblers.
The exchange began with a joke that was not easy to translate then nor easy to explain now, so I beg forbearance from Your Grace. When I made the introductions, Master Shakespeare quipped that he was “more of a play wrong than a playwright”, so I had to explain the pun to Cervantes, who answered that he was merely “a sastre, a tailor, who spent his days componiendo, remendando, snipping one paragraph here to add it there, measuring his words each time to make sure he did not get them wrong or he could end up right, derecho, in the jaws of sorrow”. Shakespeare then elaborately thanked his Spanish counterpart, for changing his opinion about tailors, as he had never thought well of them since his childhood when he had lived next to one in Stratford, so ill-tempered that he would wither the figs on a tree with his rants. As to seamstresses, added Shakespeare, that is another matter, they are a joy to all who frequent them. Cervantes agreed, as the women in his life, sisters and niece and daughter, made their living and often fed him his daily bread, by their sewing skills, which was appropriate because his characters were constantly beset by de-sastres, disasters.
“Console yourself,” said Shakespeare, “that the characters suffer so you may prosper. I have often felt pity for them, the creatures of my imagination, who have made me a man of property by enduring the torment I inflict upon them, like a god playing with flies.”
I saw this a chance to intervene, suggesting that England would recognise the genius of Cervantes if only he…- but Shakespeare interrupted me, demanding that I explain to Don Miguel that most revenue came from his part ownership of the theatre company and his role as an actor in it. Cervantes responded that “The only role I can play is myself.” And Shakespeare: “If there are as many of you as there are of me, that must be an arduous task.” And Cervantes: “As many as I can fit into one life. As many as I need to make sure I am not caught dissembling. Especially with women.”
And then they began to rant against jealousy, the sin that most destroys us, Shakespeare congratulating himself on having a wife back home who was eight years older, to which Cervantes replied, somewhat boastfully, that his Catalina was eighteen years younger. They then jested that it was a pity that years could not be exchanged like garments, as that would let Shakespeare’s wife to be younger and more vivacious and Cervantes’s to be older and more experienced and, may your Grace pardon the tasteless expression, better fucks, both of them.
And became more sombre when they lapsed into complaints about growing old, and how difficult it was to depend on daughters as their age advanced. Now it was Shakespeare’s turn to brag about his eldest daughter, Susanna, but not the other, though anyway who could tell, who could ever know what was in the nutshell of somebody else’s mind. Cervantes countered that he had an only child, Isabel, who lived with him now, but was constantly in trouble due to her wanton ways.
“Better to have a wanton daughter,” Shakespeare said, “than to watch a son die, like my little Hamnet.” He was silent for a while and then added: “Grief fills the room up with my absent child, he’s in his bed, walks up and down with me.” And then, “with thoughts that would thick my blood,” he wondered whether death did not take the joy out of living, made him question whether it was better not to have lived at all. To which Cervantes replied that what mattered in life was not being beaten, but the stubborn moment when you get up from the ground and rush headlong into the next storm.
And so it went for the rest of the night.
Until the rays of the sun beginning to peek into the windows of the Taverna del Mentidero made me realise that I had one last opportunity to test the allegiances of Cervantes.
I offered him money, if he were willing to pass on information that came his way. The English, I said (feigning, preposterously, that I was an agent for Lord Howard, recruited by this Shakespeare) would gladly reward any gossip about deliberations of King Felipe’s counsellors as to whether they thought the peace treaty would hold – and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than a dagger was at my throat. “I must live to complete the Second Part of Don Quixote,” Cervantes whispered to me, and his breath was acrid and dense, but the words were clear as steel, “so I cannot leave you marked for life as I did that oaf Sigunza, who dared insult a lady in my presence when I was younger than you are, you scoundrel. I cannot afford to flee now to Italy, as I did in my wild youth. I must live so my characters may survive along with me, but even so, if you dare ever again to cross my path or suggest that yon English playwright is part of your coarse conspiracy, I will, sir, leave you disfigured though I end up once again in prison, this do I swear.”
And having thus definitively proven his innocence, he went to embrace his confrere Guillermo who was singing a lusty song about the nothing that females hide between their legs, Cervantes shouted to his new found friend that he swore there was no finer man in the orb. And that was the last scene of their everlasting encounter as the creator of the insane knight and his pragmatic squire staggered away into the dim dawn.
Denying me the double fee I would have collected had I been able to incriminate him. Others, less scrupulous than this servant of yours, would have invented something, anything, and Cervantes would right now be carted to jail. I will not engage in such practices of deception.
I trust, nevertheless, despite the disappointing results of my investigation, that Your Grace may see fit to offer me another contract, given the pressing needs of my ailing family and the unswerving devotion shown to our common cause of purifying Spain of all manner of heretical scum.
Your faithful servant in Jesus Christ, our Lord, who surely knows I can be completely trusted.
Eduardo Villa Mason, interpreter.
Incredible.
What we think reading this second letter, what Eduardo must have thought, upon returning to Spain, already determined to rescue Shakespeare from persecution, and being given the chance to shield yet another writer that he admired.
Though he could not have foreseen that Cervantes, just like Shakespeare, was also about to find himself in dire straits. In effect, a mere nine days after Villa Mason had composed his exculpatory report on June 27th, don Gaspar de Ezpeleta, the foolish nobleman whom both authors had mocked when they first greeted each other, is grievously wounded in front of the Cervantes house. Cervantes carries him into the premises where he is nursed by the eminent author’s pious sister, Margarita, until Ezpeleta expired a few days later. Instead of this Good Samaritan action being rewarded, Villarroel, the venal investigating judge covers up the murder and carts everyone in the building off to jail for two days and then, after an extensive interrogation, places the whole lot under house arrest for a fortnight. All of them, of course, including our Cervantes, are eventually exonerated. But what would have happened if Eduardo had confirmed the worst suspicions about the creator of Don Quixote, providing ammunition to his envious enemies and the religious zealots who could now convict him of a crime he did not commit?
Absent Eduardo’s decision to betray Bocanegra, Cervantes would never have completed, 10 years later, the second part of Don Quixote, the masterpiece that is considered the truly first modern novel in history and endless progenitor of every wondrous narration ever since.
And so it came to pass that, thanks to a devious spy, Shakespeare and Cervantes survived.
Their interpreter, apparently, did not.
After those two letters of June 18th 1605, all traces of him vanish. No matter how many documents I have scoured, no matter how many antiquarians and book dealers I have begged to find some mention of his existence, nothing has emerged. No more receipts, no more ephemeral mentions in memoirs or other obscure correspondence of the age, no tax records, no affidavits, no loans from or to friends, no purchases from merchants, no registry of death or illness, nothing, nada de nada.
A benevolent interpretation would suggest that he was refused further contracts from his disappointed spymasters, and disappeared into the dust of oblivion, swallowed up by the syllables of time’s petty pace. It would be gratifying to imagine him at home, reading the next plays by Shakespeare that he has facilitated, delighted as he thumbs through the second part of Don Quixote, we can think of him mourning, in late April of 1616, the parallel passing of these men who detest him as a treacherous rogue. I see him in his doddering old age, satisfied that he has granted these men the years of reprieve he has won for them, of which, of course, they are unaware, I see him warming his bones by a kindling fire in the winter of his content.
An unlikely outcome, alas.
The fact that I found both letters together in that lost archive in Simancas means that they had lain there, side by side, for all those centuries before I discovered them, that before my eyes gently read Eduardo’s deceitful words, another pair of eyes had devoured them, the lightless eyes of – it could have been no one else – Fray Bocanegra. Who realised that his spy had been, all this time, a double agent and worse than that, was mocking the Holy Brotherhood of the Inquisition.
But how did this prelate of terror become aware of that scheme, who tipped him off?
There is one scenario that makes me shudder and yet it is the most ominously plausible one.
They met again, Cervantes and Shakespeare, a bit after they had parted, that dawn of June 18th. At the very moment that Eduardo was writing his letters, hiding his authors and his own deep self behind the performance he is orchestrating, oh yes, this is his work of art, this is his masterpiece. Without knowing that the true artists are gathered for a second time, that Shakespeare has sought out Cervantes in the Calle del Rastro, rousing him from his bed.
Shakespeare spoke a smattering of Italian, enough to warn Cervantes to be wary of this false interpreter, not to trust him if he came across his shadow ever again. And then the author of All’s Well That Ends Well made sure that Lord Howard also learned about the attempt by the Spanish secret service to turn the English playwright into an accomplice. It is doubtful that his patron would have told Shakespeare that this Villa Mason was part of his own espionage network, nor that the spy himself had that very morning attested to Shakespeare’s unswerving loyalty. What matters is that Lord Howard, when the Gunpowder Plot was detected, had one more reason to believe in his retainer’s good faith.
What about Cervantes? He had come across stoolpigeons and informers during his five years of Algerian captivity and knew the harm they could do if he did not pre-emptively strike first. He must have rushed to see Francisco de Robles, the publisher of Don Quixote, who had experience in getting books past the censors and therefore was acquainted with many potentates of the Inquisition. Robles would have taken his popular author to see some major figure (perhaps Bocanegra himself) and told him about this spy in the service of the English who had dared to approach Cervantes with such a dishonorable proposal. And that priest who ruled over the life and death of so many Spanish subjects, commended Cervantes, promised him shelter, proceeded to order the raid on Eduardo’s lodgings.
Taking possession of the two letters that spelled doom for their author, oh I could imagine the dungeon where the interrogation would begin, had already begun.
If I had been there – I can almost smell the darkness, breathe in the dank air – I know what I would have asked. What nags at me is the black hole of memory, what the interpreter witnessed and then left out, the minutiae that he thought was of no importance but that would be so valuable to us, all the puzzles in the life of both men, so many lacunae, lost years about which we know nothing, Shakespeare’s training (schoolmaster, lawyer’s clerk, glover’s apprentice?), whether gambling was what helped Cervantes to survive during decades of misery and neglect. And sex, how could the two lusty authors have not dropped hints that Eduardo surely would have enjoyed, about lovers seduced and forgotten, isn’t it likely that Cervantes detailed some of his amorous adventures in Algiers during his captivity, did Shakespeare drunkenly mention (if indeed he ever was drunk, if that was not just another lie Eduardo told?) the name of the Dark Lady of the sonnets, did either of them insinuate anything homo-erotic, would they not have bonded over their similar absences over years and years away from their respective wives?
But I was not there, it was not me forcing answers out of Eduardo. I am here at the other end, the wrong end, of four centuries, somebody else had other questions, more urgent than mine. Bocanegra would want to explore the labyrinth of Eduardo’s mind, watch from the shadows how those tormentors in his pay tried to forge, out of the splintered, inconsistent mirrors of the two reports, a unified, coherent version. Searching, above all, for the answer to one paramount question: could this traitor be trusted to have told the truth about Cervantes’s innocence?
That was what Eduardo needed to prove yet again. Shakespeare was on his way to England, out of reach, of no interest to Spain. All Villa Mason had to do was stick to his story, admit that he’s a conniving, greedy bastard, collecting from this one and that one at the same time, but that does not mean he lacks honour, that does not mean he hasn’t fulfilled the mission he was charged with. He presents, as proof of his veracity, that he did not use the occasion to line his pockets when he could have. He must have held fast, unwavering, to that version of events. He knew that he was past salvation, that he would not be forgiven, but also knew that he had been given this one last chance, before they crushed the soul out of him, to give shelter to Cervantes. His plan worked, in any case, because the author of Don Quixote lived on for 11 fruitful years.
I should be feeling exhilarated.
How I had anticipated this occasion, the end of half a century of labours and trials and trabajos as Cervantes would have called them, the justification of a life’s work. Expecting the peace that follows from drinking from the Holy Grail. Expecting closure.
Oh, blindness. To believe that finding proof that Shakespeare and Cervantes had met would be my salvation. When they remain, in spite of these two reports, as elusive as ever. No answers from them illuminate my sad sky. Only questions that haunt me, a scene I cannot wash from my mind. One does not force open the jaws and abyss of the past without unleashing all manner of ghosts.
Those last moments of Eduardo in his cell. The mystery of who he is.
Before he died, did he remember his ailing family? What became of them? Did they suffer the consequences of his behavior? Did his loved ones search for him during days and years and decades and never unravel where his remains had been dumped? Did he think of them, rebuke himself, pray they would understand why he had preferred to save strangers rather than secure the future of his own kin? Did he leave behind any orphaned daughters? Did he brood over how it was that Bocanegra had sent those men with their hands like claws to get him, why they had disembarked, that morning of all mornings, to rummage through his quarters for evidence of perfidy? Did he ever ask who had betrayed him?
And the questions get worse, questions he could not have asked but that my mirror is unwilling to deny: Would I have been able to sacrifice myself for the English playwright and the Spanish novelist, offer my life so they might survive? It is a question that stretches beyond me and encompasses every spectator who has been shaken by the howl, howl, howl of Lear, every reader who has laughed and cried at each misstep of Don Quixote. Who is ready to offer up everything for their literary heroes? Is their love, is mine, deep enough, as immense as the dead heart of Eduardo Villa Mason? When each of us declares, Oh Shakespeare, I love him, oh Cervantes, cómo lo adoro, what does that mean, the smoke of love?
Because given the choice, God help me, God have mercy on our souls, would we not decide that, finally, given the choice, would we not say, “Better that Eduardo should have died and not William, better Eduardo and not Miguel”? Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that what most readers would decide, have been thinking as they listen to me and listen to Eduardo?
Where do these demon questions come from? Who is sending them to me, not letting me sleep?
Will and Miguel, they are the ones who are demanding something from me. Speaking to me softly, as if the three of us were seated together, just for a few minutes, drinking in that Taverna del Mentidero, they whisper to me that this is the real mission I am charged with on this earth, to use the imagination Eduardo defended so fiercely in order to accompany him as his life ebbed away. So he will not have to face death alone. So somebody is there to keep watch, someone to hold his hand as he dies by himself. I scooped him from the forgotten swamp of history and have therefore made myself responsible, now and forever, for his story. That is the price I pay for the privilege of being his distant and twisted twin, for eavesdropping on the wine of his words, the secret words of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes as they met in faraway Valladolid.
Their real, their only gift to me.
The rest cannot be silence.
Oh, Eduardo, the only brother I have left, how were your last moments on this Earth?
Did you absolve your two authors and wish them well? Did you console yourself with the certainty that this act of love was worth it? Even if nobody was ever to remember or commemorate it, like so many acts of love brandished by the forgotten of history, endured by the forgotten of history. Did you feel relief, as night fell upon you, that your split life of duplicity was over, that you had only one face to wear at the end, the final and only face you had earned and deserved?
As you were dying, Eduardo, did you smile in the dark as it deepened?