...building that defines Part One, in contrast to the Duke's palatial country home in Part Two. But this first inn is also important because it is first and because it sets the tone, or better the dissonance, of the novel--the din of competing discourses of which it is composed (chivalric and picaresque in this case). Here, at the very threshold of his quest, Don Quijote will encounter, in the prostitutes and the innkeeper, the earliest representatives of the two themes that I am interested in here--love and the law. The prostitutes represent love at its lowest level and the innkeeper the law, of which he has been a favorite object and whose representative he becomes mockingly when he knights Don Quijote. The novel's plot will circle back to an inn, Juan Palomeque's this time, in which Don Quijote will be subdued, caged, and returned home--a complete reversal of his accession to knighthood in the first inn.

This first innkeeper is a retired pícaro who boasts about a misspent but adventuresome youth. Readers of his time would recognize the innkeeper's life as an itinerary of notorious picaresque emporia--gathering places where these rogues convened in large numbers to rejoice in each other's company and in their collective rejection of society's norms and the state's laws. The first innkeeper's story is a map of picaresque life of sixteenth-century Spain, as Diego de Clemencín called it. His mock confession (relayed by the narrator) is a conceited chronicle in which he translates with great ironic flair his life as a criminal into a chivalric romance. It is the language of literature in the process of being contaminated by that of the jailhouse, as it would be contained in the innkeeper's penal record, the only discourse capable of inscribing, that is, of restraining this seasoned crook. But by his rhetorical skill he can subvert it. Instead of being told in the first person, as in a conventional picaresque, the innkeeper's story is reported in an indirect style that underscores the ironic process by which roguish adventures are narrated as if they were chivalric ones. The performance is very much a part of his self-definition as a devious, skillful trickster--hence the narrator is needed to act it out, as it were. The innkeeper avails himself of a common rhetorical ruse among thugs--a form of jocular transposition and inversion of meanings and values. In their jargon (germanía), it was customary to say one thing to mean the opposite, a poetic performance as elaborate and baroque as that of contemporary Góngora-style verse. The inversion of meanings is akin to the practice of "signifying" among American Blacks and of choteo among Cubans.

The first innkeeper's life is that of an unrepentant thief and trickster who has been hauled before many criminal courts and lives off his ill-begotten fortune by continuing to fleece others. He has graduated from young pícaro and Don Juan type to middle-aged crook and is proud of it. There has been no conversion to the good here as in Guzmán de Alfarache, on the contrary, a wistful regret for a criminal past now gone, but hardly forgotten. However, the most interesting feature of his story is the transformation of picaresque into chivalric adventures, and the conquests of a common pimp into grand-style Don Juan type erotic feats involving the seduction of widows and deflowering of maidens. The narrator echoes and magnifies in mock-heroic tones the innkeeper's own sense of self worth in a bombastic, if ambivalent eulogy. This is the flip side of Don Quijote's translation of tawdry, everyday reality, into chivalric terms, as when he calls the whores at the inn "doncellas," which astonishes and delights them because the very concept could not be further from their profession. The mockery highlights the innkeeper's chicanery, holding him up as the very exemplar of criminality, cynicism, and radical lack of values.

The narrator, echoing the innkeeper, accomplishes the transformation by a typically Cervantean twist, not just by following a germanía system of tropes. By 1605, when Part One of the Quijote was published, the picaresque style of life had acquired a literary dimension, in great measure because of the success of Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache. In other words, pícaro was a role one could play like that of knight; high and low literature had the same effect and followed common literary devices, as did the language of germanía and Gongoristic poetry. The character that had been plucked out of the archive of criminal cases had become a novelistic type. It is conceivable, and Cervantes suggests it here and in "Rinconete and Cortadillo," that some of the real pícaros had chosen that path not because of need, but to play the role and to revelas a group in their collective rejection of society. They are, in a sense, doing the same as Don Quijote by adopting the style of a literary character and setting out in a life of adventure according to books read, not to society's rules. This is the reason the innkeeper can transform pícaro into knight. Of course, given the mock heroic tone and irony of the passage, it is most likely that the innkeeper is also shrouding in a literary mantle the reasons for his turning to picaresque life, which were more than likely poverty and his natural inclination to evil. The third person indirect style allows the reader to perceive the distance between truth and its embellishment. The truth of the innkeeper's story is no doubt written and stored in the criminal records of all those courts and tribunals mentioned, which are the veritable source and archive of picaresque lives.

The traveling prostitutes, who are ennobled by Don Quijote's chivalric rhetoric, are on their way to Seville with some muleteers. Picaresque life is migratory, and the inns in the Quijote serve as gathering places for the cornucopia of rogues of both sexes. Seville was the capital of picardía, the gateway to the New World,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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