CHAPTER SIX

“THE TALK OF THE TOWN” IN LOS DOS MENDOZAS

BY GONZALO DE CÉSPEDES Y MENESES: A MICROHISTORICAL READING

OF A COSTUMBRIST TEXT WITH PICARESQUE ROOTS1

KONSTANTIN MIERAU

Introduction

In the following chapter, I will discuss the short story Los dos Mendozas published in 1623 by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, court historian to Philip IV and author of a limited oeuvre of narrative prose.2 1 This chapter is based in part on material that is also discussed in chapter 3 of my PhD dissertation, which was defended on November 14, 2013 at the University of Groningen under the title Re-framing the Pícaro: The Transient Marginal of Early Modern Madrid Between Possible World and Agent Perspective. 2 For the present essay I will use the 1980 edition by Fonquerne for citations. However, it must be noted that the Fonquerne edition misses crucial episodes referring to Madrid. In the princeps that can be consulted at the Biblioteca Nacional de España there is a two-page description of the city that Fonquerne considered irrelevant and thus left out of his edition. The most prominent publications by Céspedes y Meneses are the Varia fortuna del soldado Pindaro (1626), a classic of the “soldadesca,” a genre dedicated to the lives of soldiers; and the Historias Peregrinas y Ejemplares (1623), a collection of six short stories, of which Los dos Mendozas is the sixth. There are relatively few sources on Gonzalo de Céspedes y Méneses. For an overview of the questions and the current sources, see Fonquerne in Céspedes y Meneses, Historias peregrinas, and Madroñal Duran, Sobre el autobiografismo.

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Due to its categorization in the genre of costumbrist representations of Madrid, this text is often deemed a realistic representation whose message lies in its choice of depicted elements rather than the mechanics of its depiction, that is to say the selections, manipulations, and omissions underlying the representations. A central aspect of the representation of Madrid in the Dos Mendozas is the movement of gossip throughout the city. I will argue that rather than providing a faithful representation of the practice of gossip in late-sixteenth-century Madrid, Céspedes y Meneses’s text is characterized by significant manipulations. These manipulations can be unearthed and interpreted only through a microhistorical reconstruction of the context to which the text refers, and with which it communicates.

A Literary Representation of Gossip, an Urban Practice

Let us start with the motif of gossip in Céspedes y Meneses’s representation of Madrid. 3 Halfway through the story, the Mendoza brothers, the protagonists of the tale, are ambushed by an Italian marquis. In the ensuing fight the brothers are victorious, and the marquis and his henchmen take refuge in one of the city’s convents. The next day, groups form throughout the city to discuss the events. The omniscient narrator tells us:

The next day, the story spread out over the court, and, as people do on these occasions, they divided into groups in order to gossip. Some told the story one way, others told it another way. However, all alike favoured the brothers, supported their cause and exaggerated the treacherous deed of

3 My approach to the literary representation of urban space is informed by theoretical notions brought forth and developed by the “spatial turn”—first and foremost, the notion that space is a social product that is produced through representational practices, among them literary texts. Apart from fundamental texts such as Lefebvre, The Production of Space, and De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, my closest points of reference are the recent applications of such theory to the early modern Spanish context in general by Maroto Camino, Practicing Places, and Madrid in particular by García-Santos Tomás, Espacio Urbano. These studies are representative of a wider Lefebvre-based scholarly discourse on early modern urbanity as has been made manifest in such studies as Newman, Cultural Capitals, and Griffiths, Lost Londons, to which the present study aims to contribute. When it comes to literary representation as distinct from non-literary representation such as architecture and legislature, I shall turn to narratology, in particular to Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, and Bal, Narratology.

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their adversaries, who, lords and servants, gravely injured, had fled to the convent of Atocha to nurse their wounds. And so that the Mendozas’ predicament as well as the preference of the populace and its gratefulness be better known, I shall explain what defence and support the popular opinion provided in the meanwhile, even in the temples of Bacchus, that is to say the tabernacles of gluttony and drunkenness.4

Corrillos start to form all over town. Corrillos—or so Covarrubias’s 1611 Tesoro de la lengua Castellana tells us—are small congregations convened for the sake of gossip, illicit trade, and other such behaviour. In this era the denomination corrillo had mostly a negative connotation.5 In the story, the corrillos form for the purpose of gossip. As the account of the previous day’s events moves through the city, different versions emerge. In a bar, two men start telling an inverted version of the episode, turning the brothers into the ambushers and the marquis into the innocent victim, all this within earshot of the innkeeper. This innkeeper, described as a member of the hampa or criminal underworld, steps in to defend the honour of the brothers, killing one of the men and wounding the other. The innkeeper is arrested but word of the incident reaches Philip II, who intervenes to have the innkeeper released.

The scene characterizes early modern Madrid as an integrated community and involves the king in its seemingly trivial, everyday affairs. It is representative of the literary scenes of city life that often find their way into studies of everyday life in the early modern metropolis for a supposed lack of more historical material.6 In Céspedes y Meneses’s text, the practice of congregating in public space for the sake of gossip involves all layers of the urban population making up an active information network, which, it seems, includes every stratum of the city, from Philip II 4 Los dos Mendozas, 376, my translation. “Luego, al siguiente día, se extendió por la corte este suceso, y como suele, dividida en corrillos, unos le contaban en una manera y otros de otra; si bien en todas partes, inclinados a los dos hermanos, favorecían su causa y afeaban la traición de los contrarios que peligrosamente heridos, así amos como criados, tenian hecho un hospital en el convento de Atocha. Y porque aún mejor se conozca el gran predicamento de los Mendozas, la voluntad del vulgo y su agradecimiento, diré la defensa y espaldas que, en este ínterin, tenía su opinión, y está aun en los templos del dios Baco, digo en los tabernáculos de la gula y embriaguez.” 5 Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua. Covarrubias defines corrillo as “la junta que se hace de pocos, pero para cosas perjudiciales; en estos se hallan los murmuradores, los maldicientes, los cizañosos, los que venden de socapa lo malo por bueno, o lo hurtado por suyo.” 6 Ackroyd, London; Newman, Cultural Capitals.

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to an underworld figure. The practice of gossip in the streets and squares of the court described here is highly significant as a function of the social production of urban space.

In the scene, the practice of gossip is problematized within the narrative frame via the distinction between the real account of events (“real” within the frame of Céspedes’s narrative) and the distorted account of events as told by the two men in the bar. Both accounts condition the events that follow, and the real account needs to be reinstated so that the brother’s problem can be resolved and poetic justice can occur. Strikingly, discretion over the quality of information is connected with the member of the criminal underworld, thus associating with that underworld “good” or “valid” information.

Whence does the odd attribution of authority over information to the criminal? Following common practice in the field of literary studies, this representation could be explained through the principle of the carnivalization of literature, i.e., the Bakhtin-inspired notion that literature is a place where power relations are inverted according to the “mundus inversus,” and where this inversion can be “played out” due to the freedom that Bakhtin associates with the sphere of the literary text. 7

In the Dos Mendozas, the principle of the “mundus inversus” appears to function in the carnivalistic setting of the tavern; the “temples of Bacchus,” as Céspedes y Meneses calls them. In the fact that gossip is presented as a practice involving all social tiers—from criminal to king—there is also a sense of an urban “communitas”—a temporary carnivalesque homogenization—engaged in the ritual practice of gossip, a “communitas” encompassing king and criminals, heroes and villains.8 The topsy-turvy logic of the carnival, embraced by many a cultural historian, could also be invoked to account for the active role of the criminal innkeeper as the defender of the truth. Inversion would, moreover, explain why a crook would defend truth, and why respectable citizens would lie. Such a reading could be readily inserted into a large body of writing on literary manifestations of the carnival.9 In doing so, it would link this text to more general hypotheses about the literary text as a place for subversive counter-worlds. However, such a reading would not reveal anything about 7 See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, and Bakhtin, Rabelais, for a discussion of the tavern as a carnivalistic place. 8 See Turner, The Ritual Process, for the fundamental text on the notion of “communitas,” etc. See Spariosu, Play, Liminality, for a more recent exploration of the implications of the ludic element in Turner’s theory of ritual and ritualized communication. 9 See Kuper, Zur Semiotik der Inversion.

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the specific context in which this representation was inserted. Moreover, it would be contingent on the assumption that the inversion actually took place after the observation. It would not take us toward a better understanding of the referentiality of the representation of gossip.

We can now argue that without a minute analysis of the extratextual referent of the scene, this would be no more than speculation. Such speculation, be it implicit, perhaps unconscious, or otherwise, reflects heavily on interpretation. If the inversion took place in the extraliterary realm this would mean that the literary text was the representation of a practice that is observed by the author. If, however, the inversion took place in the literary realm, this would constitute an observed practice that is acted upon by the author. A carnivalistic reading would naturally assume the latter, thus excluding the possibility of the former. Moreover, it would assume that in the nonliterary world, a crook would be a liar, thus underlining the stereotype rather than subverting it.

The necessity to distinguish between the creation of an inverted representation and a representation that is not the product of an inversion is something that any semiotically inclined scholar of representation should consider important. Naturally, the distinction between the former and the latter is fluid and continuous, but in order to make the distinction and thus interpret the text, we need a specific contextualization that will allow us to reconstruct the text’s referentiality.

At this point I would like to discuss the possibility for microhistory as a counterproof, as a test, as a means to study the referentiality of the literary representation and thus to test a common notion in cultural history. In his classic essay “On Microhistory,” Giovanni Levi posited:

The unifying principle of all microhistorical research is the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved…. Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations although the initial observations were made within relatively narrow dimensions and as experiments rather than examples.10

For my purposes here I will interpret this approach as enabling the

reconstruction of micro-level reference frames for the study of literary representations, in this case those of early modern Madrid. Such a reference frame will allow us to probe into the particular mechanics of representation in Los dos Mendozas, and the specificity of the relation 10 Levi, “On Microhistory,” 97–98.

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between city—in this case Madrid as it is characterized by the practice of gossip—and text. Let us see how this works for Céspedes y Meneses’s text, and how such an approach relates to the “carnival hypothesis” above. First, I will trace the literary referent of the idea of criminal control over information. Second, I will connect this idea to the struggle over information exchange in the urban space of late-sixteenth-century Madrid as it can be reconstructed from municipal sources.

To its contemporaries, Los dos Mendozas referred to a past that few had experienced. Published in the third decade of the seventeenth century, the story refers to late-sixteenth-century Madrid. In the story the Mendoza brothers move to the city during the reign of Philip II, who died in 1598. The other extratextual references also construct this temporal setting. However, Céspedes y Meneses never lived in the Madrid of Philip II.11 Like most of his readers, Céspedes never witnessed this context, and it is very likely that his tale—and with it the element of having a criminal as judge and defender of truth, on which we shall be focusing here—is of literary origin. The literary characterization of the court as a place infested with gossip was far from new in Spanish prose narratives of the early sixteenth century; it is already a central theme in Antonio de Guevara’s Menosprecio de la corte y alabanza de aldea (1539). The practice of gossip recurs throughout the first generation of literary representations of the villa y corte. I use the term “first generation of literary representations of the villa y corte” to refer to the first generation of texts that characterize the newly founded capital. The capital was established in Madrid in 1561 and then grew exponentially. Even though gossip is a frequent theme in this corpus, the particular link between the underworld and information quality is first seen in the Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) by Mateo Alemán.12 It is then reiterated in the picaresque classic El Buscón (1626)13 by Quevedo, the Guía y Avisos de forasteros (1620) by Liñán y Verdugo,14 the Novelas Ejemplares by Cervantes, the Diablo Cojuelo (1640) by Juan Cortés de Tolosa and various other works.15 11 For more material and bibliography on the biography of Céspedes y Meneses, see the introduction to the 1980 critical edition by Fonquerne, and Madroñal Durán, Sobre el autobiografísmo. 12 Quotations are taken from the 2009 edition by Mico. 13 Of which early manuscripts were circulating as early as 1604. 14 As, for example, in the “Novela y Escarmiento septimo” in the Guía y Avisos; see González Ramírez, Del taller. 15 I base this insight on the research for my PhD thesis, mentioned above. For gossip in early-seventeenth-century theatre, see García Santos-Tomás, Espacio Urbano.

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I argue that understanding the scene in the Los dos Mendozas in relation to Madrid entails a return to the Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). Both present a common motif and both present the idea in the close vicinity of topical representations of bars, which each refers to as templos de Baco—temples of Bacchus. 16 The many correlations in motif and vocabulary imply an intertext. In the Guzmán, the narrator warns the reader that it would be wrong to associate the city’s roaming youth of low social standing with bad information:

Do not think that because they are of low breed, they should stray further from the truth or be less certain. You are truly mistaken, for the opposite is true, and as it happens they know the essential of the matters, and there is reason for this because when it comes to understanding, there are some and many that, if they put their mind to it, have a good insight. Well, as they roam the town from one end to the other all day, through different streets and houses, and because there are so many of them and they are so dispersed.17

The Guzmán introduced the notion of underworld authority over

information that would then become a repeated motif throughout picaresque and picaresque-inflected texts, as it is in Los dos Mendozas. Both in the Guzmán and the Los dos Mendozas, there is a clear connection between the urban underworld and the quality of information. It is a departure from classical notions of sermo rusticus and nobilis, which remain present in a poetics dominated by Horacian and Aristotelian thinking, in which a hierarchy of class was connected with information quality. Guzmán steps up to oppose this stereotype and thus creates this new motif in the realm of literary representations of late-sixteenth-century Madrid. 18 Céspedes y Meneses repeats this notion. Each in their way makes information quality an explicit element in their narratives. 16 Guzman, 334; Historias, 337. 17 Guzmán, 334. “No entiendas que por ser bajos en calidad han de alejarse más los suyos de la verdad o ser menos ciertos. Engañaste de veras, que antes al contrario, y acontece saber ellos lo esencial de las cosas, y hay razón para ello porque en cuanto al entendimiento, algunos y muchos hay que, si lo acomodasen, lo tienen bueno. Pues como anden todo el día de una en otra parte, por diversas calles y casas, y sean tantos y anden tan divididos, oyen a muchos muchas cosas.” 18 See Shepard, El Pinciano. Navajas, Mimesis y Cultura, see also the Arte nuevo: “Guárdese de imposibles, porque es máxima/que sólo ha de imitar lo verisímil:/el lacayo no trate cosas altas/ni diga los conceptos que hemos visto/en algunas comedias extranjeras.”

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Tracing the inspiration for Céspedes y Meneses yields an insight into how material introduced into the literary realm by the singular subjectivity of the pícaro can cross generic boundaries and manifest itself—now as an established motif—in other genres. A “picaresque” observation is inserted into a costumbrist text characterized by the objective frame of the omniscient narrator. Céspedes, the historian, by reiterating this characterization of the city and the practice of its inhabitants, authorizes the rhetoric developed by Mateo Alemán. In a sense he liberates the idea from the conditioning voice of the pícaro, always essentially unreliable as it is the confession of a liar, in the words of Claudio Guillén.19

However, tracing the idea of criminal information quality back to the Guzmán is no argument against “carnivalistic literary inversion.” This requires a scan of other domains. The notion that criminals and roaming youth are part of a tight community sharing information among themselves, is also present in the texts of social reformers such as Cristobal Pérez de Herrera and Miguel de Giginta (contemporaries of Mateo Alemán). However, this awareness was not restricted to learned social reformers writing treatises; on the day-to-day level, it can be deduced from requests such as that of a watchman asking for funding to infiltrate communities of underworld figures in order to find out their plans. Such requests reveal the regard officials have for underworld information flows.20 The notion existed before the literary text, and thus it is a matter of inversion not in but of the literary frame, which let go of stock characters in favour of as-yet-unrepresented subjectivities, first and foremost the pícaro. Mateo Alemán and Céspedes did not create an inverse image; they modified literary form by expressing a mentality that was present in many differing representations of the city. 19 Guillén, “Towards a Definition of the Picaresque.” 20 The following request can be found in the files of the Cámara de Castilla: Archivo General de Simancas (henceforth AGS), Cámara de Castilla, legajo 501, 311: de 13e de noviembre de 1583/VM me a mandado remitir un memorial/de mateo Perez de Portillo/alguazil de vagamundos desta corte […] y supplica A VM/le haga alguna merced para […] una dellas y que / para que mejor pueda exercer su oficio para lo qual nos/ puede escusar un cavalo y dos mocos/y dadivas que hare agentes que/le dan noticias de algunos delinquentes y vagamundos se le haga VM. AGS, Cámara de Castilla, legajo 501, 311, dated November 13, 1583, “Your majesty has asked me to remit a request by Mateo Pérez de Portillo, the constable of the vagabonds of the court and he supplicates your Majesty to grant him a grace [...] so that he may execute his office better, for which he cannot go without a horse and two helpers and goods so that he can employ agents who can give him information concerning certain delinquents and vagabonds.”

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The Talk of the Town: A Disputed Practice

The Los dos Mendozas and the Guzmán are often used to fill in gaps in current historical studies of the city. This poses a hermeneutical problem: in the absence of an extratextual context of interpretation, the many literary representations of the city, as in the case of the representation of gossip in our current example, are equated with the said context. What we read is presumed to be what happened. Literary representation is thus reduced to a series of impressions, and the generic label “costumbrism” that has—a posteriori—been attached to the Dos Mendozas has done little to remedy this equation. This reasoning eliminates beforehand a possible context of discovery: namely, the discursive distance between the city as it is perceived by agents in it—mayors, constables, citizens—and its representation in literary texts. Let us therefore proceed to identify the micro-level reference frame of Mateo Alemán and Céspedes y Meneses.21

In late-sixteenth-century Madrid, there was an absence of institutionalized sources of news that catered to the urban population in its entirety. The first Gazetta arrived fifty years later, and in any case at that time few knew how to read. 22 Oral communication was the main information channel. According to Tamotsu Shibutani: “rumour flourishes when the supply of information is inadequate to meet the demand for it.”23 This appears to have been the case in Madrid, if the many literary sources can be believed. The few travelogues we have from the period corroborate this characterization.24 However, although gossip was common practice, this was not appreciated by the municipal government, who repeatedly prohibited its practice in public spaces.25 At the turn of the seventeenth century, information exchange in public spaces in Madrid was undergoing 21 In fact Alemán, in his function as investigative judge, held in-depth interviews with those consigned to forced labour. See Bleiberg, El “informe secreto.” 22 See Ettinghausen, “The News in Spain”; Briggs & Burke, A Social History of the Media. 23 Quoted in Briggs & Burke, A Social History of the Media, 93. 24 For example by Enrique Cock. See Hernandez Vista, El Madrid de Felipe II. 25 Alvar Ezquerra, Espacios Sociales, points out that a number of decrees from the late sixteenth century prohibiting congregation for gossip in indicated areas of the city provide insight into where the madrileños chose to congregate for ambulant commerce and the exchange of gossip. The decrees are not reproduced in the study, nor are they related to the abundant corpus of literary representations of gossip in the city. García Santo-Tomás, who discusses the subject of gossip (see García Santo-Tomás, Espacio Urbano, 74–88) in the Madrid of Philip IV, never once mentions the prohibited nature of the practice, focusing exclusively on its many literary representations.

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a process of transformation, both in practice and in legal status. In the records of the alcaldes de casa y corte, the council of mayors, we can find several references to gossip in the period to which the literary representations refer. The entries date from 1586, 1588, 1596, and 1599, and more promulgations follow in the first decades of the seventeenth century.26

The first of the entries, dating from 1586, prohibits corrillos and baratillo:

The mayor council orders that no person should be allowed to gather for gossip or barter in the main square of this town, nor at the Puerta del Sol (nor in any other part) under the threat of one hundred lashes and five years of exile.27

Baratillo refers to congregation for the sake of petty commerce; it too has a rather negative connotation. Covarrubias defines baratillo as “a corrupt sort of people who gather at nightfall in the corners of the square and sell from under their cloaks the old for new and who cheat each other.”28 The promulgations mention the “plaza publica” (i.e., the Plaza Mayor) and the “puerta de sol” in particular, and then extend the prohibition to all other parts of the city. Various scholars have noted that the mention of particular places provides an insight into the social spaces where the madrileños convened. 29 Castro Ibaseta argues that these promulgations reveal the precedents of the mentidero at the Gradas de San Felipe, the steps of the church of St. Philip. A mentidero is a speaker’s corner, where people convened to share news, to gossip and discuss the events of the day; it is a corrillo with a fixed place. The Gradas de San Felipe, also mentioned in the Buscón, would go on to become an institution during the reign of Philip IV. In the gatherings on the Plaza Publica, the Puerta del Sol, and the other places mentioned in the promulgations Castro Ibaseta sees the 26 All the promulgations are from AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1197 and 1198, respectively. 27 AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1197: “Mandan los señores Alcaldes de la cassa y corte de su magestad que/ninguna persona sea osada de se juntar a hazer corrillos ni/barratillo en la plaza publica de esta villa ni en la puerta de/el sol della (ni en otra parte) so pena de cada ciento azotes y cinco años de/destierro […].” 28 Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua 288: “cierta junta de gente ruin, que a boca de noche se juntan en un rincón de la plaza y debajo de capa venden lo viejo por nuevo y se engaña unos a otros.” 29 In additon to Castro Ibaseta, “Mentidero de Madrid,” these promulgations have been mentioned in Escobar, The Plaza Mayor, 112, Alvar Ezquerra, Espacios Sociales.

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first seeds of the increasingly politicized mentidero that would mark the reign of Philip IV. According to Ibasetta, the crackdown on gossip in the public space can be linked to emerging popular opinion in the early decades of the seventeenth century, highlighted during such scandals as the Lerma affair and the execution of Rodrigo Calderón.30 However, the first attempts to control public gossiping antedate Lerma by almost two decades. In 1588, another pregón or promulgation had been communicated, again prohibiting congregation for the sake of gossip and petty commerce on the Plaza Mayor, as well as all other places in the villa y corte: “The mayors of the town council of his majesty order that no person shall be allowed to gather on the main square nor in any other place in order to gather for gossip or to buy and sell.”31 In this particular promulgation, there is an additional section dedicated to pregoneros, the town criers, who are prohibited from joining the gatherings: “No town crier […] is to be found where the aforementioned gatherings form under the threat of one hundred lashes and the loss of the goods they carry for sale.” 32 The prohibition reflects the municipality’s attempts to control the information supply in the city, which was intended to establish a distinction between the information provided by the town criers and the information exchanged in the corrillos.33 The explicit warning to town criers against joining the corrillos is an attempt by the city government to control the official information channel that extended from the mayor’s council via the town crier to the people.

In each of the promulgations, a connection is established between congregation for the sake of commerce and gathering for the sake of gossip. This suggests a link between increasing private enterprise and a budding public sphere. In 1596, a similar decree on the subject followed, and in 1599 the mayors made another specific reference to the town criers.

The mayors of the town council order that no person should be allowed to gather nor barter nor sell any of his or anyone else’s things, neither new nor old, big or small, during the day nor during the night, in no square nor

30 Castro Ibasetta, “Mentidero de Madrid.” 31 AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1197: “Mandaron los señores alcaldes de la casa e corte de su magestad/que nenguna persona sea osada de juntarse en/la plaza mayor de esta villa ni en otra parte/a acer corrillos dar a conprar y bender [...].” 32 AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1197: “ningun pregonero […] este donde se liazen los susodichos corrillos so pena/de cada cien acotes y perdimiento de lo ansi/lo llevaren e vendieren.” 33 See Bejarrano Pellicer, “Medios de comunicación,” for a discussion of the town crier.

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street of the entire court, under the threat of public shaming and four years of exile from the court and five leagues, which is to be imposed without reduction, and if anyone should need to sell anything it should be given to the town criers of the court who shall sell the goods in the streets without meeting nor gathering for gossip where they please, under the threat of public shaming and four years of exile from the court, this order is to be promulgated so that it be known to all.34

The mayors, it seems, have become aware of the commercial role of

the congregations, and thus attempt to dictate a solution: those who have goods to sell can do so through the town criers, who in turn, are again explicitly instructed not to gather in groups. This time the principal addressees are the town criers. The mayors repeatedly order the town criers to act as officials, and to stay away from the gossiping multitudes. This shows the ineffectiveness of their attempts, but it also reveals a notion of information quality and authority similar to those in the Guzmán and the Los dos Mendozas.

When contemplating the attempts to remove the town criers from the gossiping masses, among them many a pícaro, one cannot help but recall Lazarillo de Tormes. Lazarillo reached the peak of his career as a town crier in Toledo, proudly declaring that he had obtained an oficio real:35

My job is to announce the wines that are sold in this city and in auctions, and lost things, accompany those that have been convicted and declare at a high voice their crimes: town crier, speaking in good romance.36

Lazarillo de Tormes had risen from pícaro to pregonero. He is a figure that lingers in every text remotely related to the picaresque. The futile attempts by the mayors to separate the town crier from the pícaro-infested 34 AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1198: “Mandaron los señores alcaldes de la casa y corte de su magestad que ninguna/persona sea osada de hazer juntas ni baratillo ni vender cosa/suya ni agena nueba ni bieja grande ni pequeña de dia ni de/noche en ninguna placa ni calle de toda la corte so pena de/verguenza publica y quatro años de destierro de la corte y cinco/leguas que sera executado yrremisiblemente y si/alguna persona tubiere nezesidad de bender alguna cosa la de/a los pregoneros desta corte los quales las vendan y por/las calles sin hacer juntas ni corrillos a su ocasion de vender/las tales cosas so la pena de verguenza publica y qua/tro años de destierro mandase pregonar por que venga/a noticia de todos. 35 The status of the office is discussed in detail in Folger, Picaresque and Bureaucracy, 67 et passim. See also Bejarano Pellicer, “Medios de comunicación.” 36 Lazarillo, 129: “tengo cargo de pregonar los vinos que esta ciudad se venden, y en almonedas y cosas perdidas, acompañar los que padecen persecuciones por justicia y declarar a voces sus delitos: pregonero, hablando en buen romance.”

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crowd and the lingering memory of the proto-pícaro Lazarillo de Tormes seem to tell us that you can remove the pregonero from the pícaro, but you cannot remove the pícaro from the pregonero, for they are one and the same person. The pregonero was, after all, the recipient of the lowest of the official positions in the city, which signalled perhaps the first step up for the unemployed vagrant youth that is represented by the pícaro.

In the latter part of the sixteenth century, controlling the exchange of information was of great concern to the city administration. In the decrees, gossip is always connected to ambulant trade; whereas in Los dos Mendozas, it is related to festive occasions. The mayors perceived this connection and tried to control the two linked activities by delegating both activities exclusively to the town criers, and then removing the town criers, now made the official representative of both the supply of validated information and of small-scale retail commerce, from the gatherings. One could argue that the prohibition of gossip in public places was an attempt to restrict gossip to the sphere of traditional communities, who met within their professional circles, parishes, and confraternities, in houses and hospitals. These traditional communities were organized along the lines of class, estate, and nationality. Prohibiting gatherings that would connect different tiers of the populace would maintain social stratification as well as cultural and ethnic differentiation. In short, dividing the talk of the town was meant to separate the different communities and thus impede their consolidation into a larger integrated community. Divide et impera.

Castro Ibaseta indicates that the subject matter of the corrillos and mentideros became increasingly political at the turn of the century.37 The people in the corrillo now discuss the performance of statesmen and demand changes in government. In this more intensively politicized context, the hampa member’s control of the streets and of information flows becomes ever more potent. Laitinen and Cohen characterize the early modern street:

Streets were shaded, nuanced places; multiple aspects and tones of publicity and privacy figure in our early modern streetscapes. Public and private were at once ideals and practices; here they are not the only ones. Other ideals and realities, or norms and practices, are central themes. Diverse desires for order, in collision with practices of urban living, sometimes stirred conflict, or spurred subtle negotiation. In response to their own urban outlooks, and to their regimes’ designs, people placed themselves in the streets, or were placed there by decree and fiat. Relations between the lives of local townspeople, the shared cultural conceptions,

37 See Castro Ibaseta, “Mentidero de Madrid,” 51–53.

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and ‘official order,’ or (to put this complex negotiation in different terms) relations between the reality of urban living and the ideals about behaviour or between individuals, community, and state—men and women, commoners, magistrates, lords, and queens—manifested themselves in the streets.38

In the street, gossip links various places in the city. In Los dos Mendozas, too, there is an emphasis on places that are connected by this practice: for example, the circuit uniting the tavern, the palace, and the Plaza Mayor. The Gradas de San Felipe in the Buscón links Madrid to the world. In the tavern, the truth is defended; in the palace, its defence is authorized. Through the street, the information moves from the palace to the town’s bars and back. There is an information exchange between court and bar, and the information flow among these places takes place in the street, the territory that is perhaps not under the control of the criminal underworld, but that is most certainly monitored by this demimonde’s network of roaming informants.

Recent micro-level research into the practice of gossip in early modern Venice by Alexander Cowan has revealed that gossip played an important part in the establishment of relationships between families. Although many of the valorizations of gossip are negative, the practice of gossip plays a crucial role in forging social cohesion; in spite of a pejorative and gendered definition of gossip (as false, frivolous, and female), men engaged in the practice and stood to profit from it quite as much as women.39 That is to say, a negative valorization does not imply a negative effect when it comes to the functioning of the urban network; however, it does point toward a discourse, a debate with specific positions and interests. In Los dos Mendozas, but also in such well-known contemporary texts as the Pinciano (1596), the Guzmán (1599), and the Buscón (1626), there is a significant contrast between the presentations of the motif of Madrid as a gossiping city in the frame of a negative valorization of gossip on the one hand, and the intricate plots revolving around gossip and information exchange on the other hand. The corpus of literary works not only represented valorizations in the extraliterary realm but also engaged them in their narratives.

Gossip, according to Cowan, integrates the public and the domestic.40 Gossip is at once political and private, and is very much contingent on control over urban space; the ability to engage in a certain practice in a 38 Laitinen and Cohen, Early Modern European Streets, 2. 39 Cowan, “Gossip and Street Culture.” 40 Cowan, “Gossip and Street Culture,” 319.

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controlled environment reflects the nature of control. Control of the corrillos means jurisdiction of the connection between palace and tavern; it means control of the private. The municipality’s efforts are geared toward entering this space; however, it is clear that the institutions that are supposed to represent authority cannot dictate the content of the corrillo.

The author Céspedes responds to this environment. The same corrillos described by Céspedes y Meneses that formed in todas partes are forbidden in the main square, the Puerta de Sol, or any other part of the city. The literary representation in Céspedes y Meneses’s text omits a crucial element of the activity it represents, in spite of the disputed nature of the practice of gossip in both the context to which Mateo Alemán and Cespedes y Meneses refer, and the context in which the Los dos Mendozas is published. Apart from valorizing information in a manner distinct to literary convention, as we have seen in the characterization of the criminal as the defender of the truth, the congregation in public spaces for the sake of gossiping in Los dos Mendozas represents a practice that is forbidden in the context to which the text refers. And yet, interestingly, the forbidden nature of the practice is never mentioned.

Let us ponder this last point, because it is both striking and possibly characteristic of the first generation of literary representations. The texts never fail to mention the forbidden nature of duelling, brawling, and other such activities. For example, prior to the fight, the brothers ask the marquis—with whom they are scheduling a duel—to beware the gossiping crowd becoming aware of the plans to hold the duel, as they are afraid of getting arrested for duelling. Strangely, none of the characters are afraid of being apprehended for joining in a corrillo, for which, as we have seen, the punishment was a hundred lashes and five years of exile.

Now, the transgressions of rules, of social convention and so forth, are the stuff stories are made of. Crossing the threshold is a basic concept of the novel, and the notion of literary space as a space of transgression is commonplace. 41 However, the prohibition against gossip is never mentioned here. And a boundary that cannot be crossed within the narrative, for lack of mentioning, may in fact be crossed in the realm of the relation between narration and the discourse within which it functions. The persistent representation of gossip as an urban practice in the literary text (and Céspedes y Meneses’s text is but one of many), combined with the insistent omission of the prohibited nature of this practice, creates a certain literary impunity or free space in a supposed history shared by few of its original readers. 41 Aguirre, Margins and Thresholds; Spariosu, Play, Liminality.

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This would be the idea of a common, public space in which interaction is not regulated or prohibited by the municipal power. Céspedes y Meneses presents this idea as if it were a verisimilar representation of late-sixteenth-century Madrid, the Madrid of the late rey prudente Philip II. Moreover, it associates the king with a forbidden practice everyone engages in. Reading about Philip II gossiping with his fellow madrileños, is, I suggest, inflected by hearing, from the city streets, among the noise of a city under construction, one of the town criers prohibiting the very same practice in which the king engages in the text. By reconstructing the voice heard on each and every square in Madrid, I hope to have shown that the texts under discussion also functioned in the reality of a reader who might have been confronted with attempts by the municipal government to crack down on gossip in public spaces. This insight reflects on the scope and specificity of contextualization chosen to analyze the literary text. Discussing the text in light of general tendencies, such as the human need for gossip in the absence of structural news provision, would have yielded a quite different reading of the text.

Concluding Remarks: Microhistory and Literary Representations of Urban Space

There is much to be said on, for example, the motivations behind such an omission, but let me conclude. This path for further research and speculation could not have been opened without referring back to the micro-level context of the city government. Our approach is thus very much centred on specific and individual clues, quite in keeping with the notion of microhistory summarized by Matti Peltonen:

The important common feature of the new microhistory advocated by Ginzburg and Levi is the ‘method of clues.’ By this they mean starting an investigation from something that does not quite fit, something odd that needs to be explained. This peculiar event or phenomenon is taken as a sign of a larger, but hidden or unknown structure. A strange detail is meant to represent a wider totality.42

Utilizing this focus on clues to analyze the representation of urban

practices in literary representations of the city avoids the explanation of urbanity as represented in literature in the context of large-scale ideological, economic, or cultural developments (i.e., imperialism, capitalism, 42 Peltonen, “Clues Margins and Monads,” 349.

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the Baroque), and takes us to a commensurable level of proof and counterproof. I hope to have shown that introducing the microhistorical approach to the study of picaresque texts will fill a lacuna in contexts of interpretation that have so far been employed in the study of picaresque and related texts. The above approach would both add to the material base of microhistory and to the status quaestionis concerning the picaresque novel. We have used clues such as petitions by city police, decrees by the mayors, and biographical information about the authors to reveal that the literary text represents, perhaps proposes, a different value system or, at the very least, shows the inconsistency of a rule proclaimed (repeatedly, at high voice, publicly) but not applied, and in retrospect negated by omission, thus exposing literature as a vehicle for representing the inconsistency of authority. Rather than explain literature as a manifestation of general tendencies—for example the propensity for gossip in an urban environment without institutionalized news provision—we can thus lay bare how the representation of an activity relates to its legal and social status. We have thus found the plurality envisioned by microhistory. As Levi stated:

Microhistorians have concentrated on the contradictions of normative systems and therefore on the fragmentation, contradictions and plurality of viewpoints which make all systems fluid and open.43

However, to lay bare these contradictions, we—as literary historians—

had to both break free from the macro level that dominates the academic field most qualified to discuss texts such as the Los dos Mendozas and relate to these tendencies and their methods. In literary studies, macro is not the macro-economic or the large-scale sociological, as it may be for the historian, but is rather represented by functionalist generic archetypes such as the notion of the carnival, which, when it comes to the present case study, would merely have explained away the odd connection between criminals and the authority of information.

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