SOURCE: Vasvari, Louise O. “‘Chica cosa es dos nuezes’: Lost Sexual Humor in the Libro del Arcipreste.” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 24, no. 1 (January 1990): 1-22.

[In the following essay, Vasvari contends that certain problematic portions of the The Book of Good Love are attributable to early expurgations of the text.]

The Libro del Arcipreste (=LdA), as we read it today contains numerous contradicions and several truncated and elusive episodes. The difficulty of some episodes is, I believe, due to two factors, incompatibility of some new intercalated passages within the surrounding context of an earlier version of the text and the fact that several passages have become devoid of sense because the songs to which they serve as a narrative introduction are missing, likely having been removed by early expurgators.¹

Several particularly enigmatic narrative episodes are, perhaps not coincidentally, interpolations found only in the later so-called 1343 redaction which also have their announced lyric poems truncated.² I shall discuss in this paper two of these episodes, the bizarre fragment of the old lady with whom the narrator exchanges insults (st. 945-49), and his first love adventure with the unnamed dueña cuerda (77-104). I shall work towards a reconstruction of their missing lyric sections and shall attempt to show that episodes which have become incomprehensible and hence of little appeal to audiences today can yield meaning when studied in the context of other texts, within and outside of the LdA, which evoke identical stereotyped situations and linguistic games.³ Further, I aim to show that the missing lyrics are further examples of the same hilarious and obscene topsy-turvy carnivalesque tradition of burlesque lyrics, or trovas cazurras, as the LdA's extant lyrics about the easy bakergirl Cruz and the sexually demanding serranas.

Walsh (“Genesis:” 8; “Songs:” 1) has suggested that several now bland and meaningless episodes in the Libro were likely originally as wild and comical as the Cruz and serranilla adventures, also present, significantly only in the expanded version of the text. This hypothesis is particularly enticing, since, as Willis has convincingly shown (“Seedbed:” 224), later interpolations were likely in response to the tastes of “Juan Ruiz's” public, who were interested in more stories of illicit sex. In fact, the expanded version of the Libro contains considerably more equivocal wordplay than the earlier one, but the only idea we have as to what the bawdiest cantares now lost may have contained is in the clues provided in their surviving narrative cuaderna vía introductions. These clues are likely to be reliable, since in both the Cruz and the serrana episodes, the narrator recounts his adventure twice, first in narrative heptasyllables, and then in octosyllables, as if to imply in the first half “this is the unpleasant adventure as it really happened to me,” and, in the second, “this is how I make fun of it and of myself by recounting it in jest,” although of course he gets to play and direct all the equally ficticious roles himself (cf. Alonso Hernández: Juglaría 136).

The narrative half of the Cruz adventure offers both metatextual and semantic clues to how it should be understood. It concludes by introducing the following lyric with a denying device, where the poet, pretending to excuse himself in advance before a fictive audience of ladies with delicate ear, in effect pointedly calls attention to the scabrous tone of the verses to follow, a technique which would simultaneously have served as a directive to the audience to perk up their ears and listen (Willis ed.):⁴

Fiz' con el grand pesar esta troba caçurra;
la dueña que la oyere, por ello no me aburra,
ca devríame dezir neçio mas que bestia burra,
si de tan gran escarnio yo non trobasse bulrra.

The introductory narrative also serves the poet to imbed a clever wordplay on the bakergirl Cruz's name (112d yo cruziava por ella) and to set up the key polysemic syntagm for both parts of the episode, (113b) el compañero súpome el clavo echar, which, as I have shown elsewhere (Semiología), when understood as an idiom means that his friend who served as go-between deceived him by stealing the girl. However, when the idiom is decomposed into its constitutive elements, the denotative meaning of clavo echar ‘drive in the nail’ also simultaneously suggest sacriligiously that the cuckolded protagonist equates his suffering to that of Christ on the cross. Finally, on the sexual level the same terms imply that the compañón ‘friend/testicles’ metaphorically hit the mark with his clavo ‘nail/phallus,’ thus deceiving or “screwing” the protagonist. It is the unlocking of the multiple levels of erotic carnivalesque wordplay in the one key set phrase clavo echar which makes it possible to reconstruct the Cruz lyric as a hilarious parodia sacra.

The author by his metatextual cues encourages his audience in this exercise of deflating exegesis. His construction of a bawdy story out of a polysemic expression which serves as both leitmotif and punchline is a well established technique in medieval literature. Compare Boccaccio's Decameron, which is replete with such joke tales, as in the burlesque of an alba where a girl pretends to her parents that she has insomnia and wants to sleep on the balcony in order to odir cantar l'usignolo, where usignolo is to be understood both as ‘nightingale’ and ‘phallus’ (Dec. V.4). When the next morning, she is discovered by her father sound asleep, with her hand on her lover's sexual organ, the father calls out to his wife “come quick and see the usignolo your daughter has caught in her cage,” thus laying bare the maliciously pseudo-euphemistic code on which the titillating humor of the episode rests (Vasvari: “L'usignolo”).

LA VIEJA QUE VINO A VER AL ARçIPRESTE

The 1330 version of the LdA prodeeds directly from the history of Melón and Endrina, which marks the end of the first half of the text (909), to the beginning of the Archpriest's adventures in the sierra (950). However, in the 1343 version two new episodes are introduced, the first about the narrator's adventures with an unnamed girl who dies, and the brief anecdote where an old woman visits the protagonist. Critical opinion has been sharply divided on the meaning of this episode of the old woman, with scholars agreeing only that it does not fit neatly into the rest of the work. She has even been interpreted allegorically as old age or death, although most critics have simply assumed that she is Trotaconventos.⁵

Before conjecturing about the contents of the missing lyric portion of the episode with the old woman, we need to examine, as we did in the Cruz episode, the extant five-strophe narrative cuaderna vía introduction for possible clues to its content. The very first verse, a sterotyped spring exordium (945a El mes era de março, salido de verano), already signals ambiguous intent, because all occurrences of variants of this hackneyed phrase in the LdA signal the beginning of burlesque carnivalesque episodes, as, e.g., in the immediately following adventures of the narrator with the serranas (951a El mes era de março, día de Sant Meder).⁶ The rest of the introduction offers only the slightest hint of a plot: a woman, identified only as una vieja, comes to visit the Archpriest only to insult his lovesick demeanor; and something unspecified occurs between them, after which she insults him once again. Rather than replying to her charges, the Archpriest defends himself before his audience by referring to her as “one of those old hags whom the Devil should take” and blames her foul-mouthed insults on her state of inebriation.

Of the five strophes of the introductory narrative only two are devoted to this sketchy plot, while in the three remaining strophes the narrator announces the cantares caçurros, now missing, which he claims to have written about the insults he suffered. He proceeds to beg pardon of the ladies present, whom he asks not to get angry at the following songs because they will make them laugh. This disclaimer is but a much longer version of that preceding the songs in the Cruz episode, but with a new twist: the poet maintains that it is unavoidable in a long and wise discourse to stray occasionally from the straight path. This ingenuous claim of ineptitude leaves little doubt that these missing songs, too, were obscene:⁷

947 De toda esta lazería e todo este coxixo
fiz' cantares caçurros, de quanto mal me dixo:
non fuyan d'ellos las dueñas, nin los tengan por lixo,
ca nunca los oyó dueña que d'ellos non rixo
948 A vos dueñas señoras, por vuestra cortesía
demandóvos perdón, que sabed no querría
aver saña de vos, ca de pesar morría;
consentid entre los sesos una tal bovaquía.
949d el oidor cortés tenga presto el perdón

This lengthy pseudo-disclaimer justifies examening more closely the two-strophe anecdote for clues to the bawdy humor of the missing lyrics. Since in the Middle Ages deformation of the body was considered comic (e.g., as in the LdA's description of the hideous serranas), old people were among favorite objects of ridicule, even more so when they combined ugliness with sexuality. Libidinous old women have especially been the butt of jokes in popular humor, a traditional attitude exemplified in Spanish proverbs like no ai viexa de la zintura abajo and carne puta no envejeze (Combet). Walsh (“Genesis”: 2) has already suggested earlier analogues for this episode in insult songs featuring old women in Galician and Provençal tradition and later ones in the Cancionero de Baena (vid. “Dona velha, feia e sandia” in Rodrigues Lapa: nu. 201; cf. nu. 307). Compare also the burlesque zéjel (Frenk Alatorre: 320):

Alla yras, doña vieja
con tu pelleja.
Sospira como moçuela,
dize que amor la desvela,
no tiene diente ni muela,
rrumia al comer como oveja …

In other European literatures, compare, e.g., the jokes about old women who want to marry young men and end up nastily deceived (Ranke: nu. 178 & 179), or the French dance song which, like the zéjel, ridicules hags with only two teeth in their head who want to act young (Bartsch: 182). Cf. also the Piemontese la vecchia sposa (Variants of which are found from Cataluña to Provençe), who wants to marry the best looking youth on the piazza, even though she has only three teeth (Nigra: nu. 86). Traditional songs collected today in rural areas still continue to make erotic old women objects of fun (Scafoglia: 32-3).

The description of the decrepitude of old women is in many senses the stereotyped inverse of the portrait of the idealized dame, with, for example, emphasis on the old hag's sagging breasts and stinking breath, the opposite of the small hard tetons and the sweet breath of the beloved. Old women's grotesque inappropriateness as a sexual partner is further emphasized by description of their excessive make-up, drunkenness, lasciviousness, and repulsive physical appearance—sometimes reduced to a disgusting description of their putrid, hairless, grasping pudendum (compare Gourdin, Paupert-Bouchiez). Women became demoted to the “old hag” category by about the age of menopause, as in the Renart le Contrefait (v. 25303), where to marry a woman over fifty was considered to “pecher contre nature” (Morawski 1917: 139). Compare also Rutebeuf's grotesquely comical Mariage and Complainte about his fifty year old wife, who is old and ugly but still potentially seductive and able to bear a child, or Boccaccio's description in his Corbaccio of a widow, still trying to be seductive, whose ‘evil black hole’ is equated with and named after the volcano Malpertugio.

While ultimately the caricature of ugly, drunken, and amorous old women can be traced back to the Greek kordax, a particularly important antecedent of the vieja in the Libro is the old hag in the anonymous Latin De Vetula, a pseudo-autobiography of “Ovid” composed in the thirteenth century and a work of tremendous popularity in the Middle Ages, judging by the number of surviving manuscripts (Klopsch, Rabathan). Rico has shown that this work was a likely influence in the LdA in structure as well as theme. In De Vetula an old meretrix agrees to arrange an assignation for the protagonist with a sixteen-year old girl. When he arrives for his nocturnal rendezvous, he immediately begins to undress in the dark and gets in bed with what he thinks is the girl. After a little tactile examination he soons realizes that in bed with him is not the young woman he had lusted after but the ugly old go-between. He describes in gross detail her repugnant body (II 500-8) and flees, swearing heavily against her (II: 526-49). In the French translation and expansion of the story by Jean Lefèvre (Cocheris: 450-8) the protagonist also describes in pointed rhyme how he lost his erection and couldn't get it back because of the shock he suffered:

mais fait les membres refroidir
Et n'ont volunté de roidir

After describing in detail the ugliness of the old woman, he once again reiterates that the experience made him lose all his vigour. Compare also the story in Boccaccio's Filocolo (IV.63.8), probably also influenced by De Vetula, where a man caught with a young girl is meted out an unusual punishment by her brothers, that he sleep with her for one year and one year with an old woman, being forced to treat each with identical sexual attention (Bruni 1974: 206-7). Also analogous to the Libro's text is the thirteenth-century parodic Occitan chanson where a suitor sends gifts to a woman through an old go-between. It is the old woman herself who shows up in the dark of night and lifts up her skirt, wanting to be batuda subre son tabor ‘hit/played on her drum/pudendum.’ The lover, not recognizing her in the dark, turns to caress her, but as soon as he feels her disgusting body he runs away. He admits, however, that the shock has caused him to become impotent, for which his revenge is to curse her (Bec: 180-1).⁸

The Archpriest-narrator's disclaimer to the missing cantares coupled with the popular humorous tradition of burlesque sexual encounters between an old woman and a younger man, of which I have cited only a few examples, justifies our examining closely the anecdote for verbal clues to ascertain if the humour of the situation in this episode was also in the allusion to a tryst between the Archpriest and the old woman.

What actually transpired between the narrator and the old bawd is alluded to in a single verse, 945d: yo travé luego de ella e fablélo en seso vano. We must, therefore, examine, in some detail possible connotations of the two keys terms, travar and seso vano. Willis (Edition) interprets the verse rather gently as ‘I seized on her immediately and spoke to her in an empty headed way,’ but Catalán suggests that the very concrete sense of trabar is intended, for example, that the Archpriest physically grabbed hold of the old woman.

Catalán's reading of the verse is strongly supported by all other ocurrences of travar and seso vano in the Libro. In all, trabar appears eleven times, with ‘to grab with violence, seize, rip out’ always as the predominant meaning. While the verb always denotes violent physical action, several times it has, in addition, strong sexual connotations, as, for example, the suggestive song of the mountain girl who brags about her ability to overpower men physically.⁹

Seso vano in the second hemistich of 945d (as in an earlier passage in 686c) is an ambiguous as travar and is likely to have stronger meaning than ‘emptyheaded chatter.’ Vano ‘vain’ includes the sense ‘earthly/carnal’ (as in 227a cuidar vano, 229c vano cuidado) and is synonymous with 9950b, 992c) loca demanda and (950d) syn seso, referring ultimately to the opposition of the prose prologue (67b et passim) between los cuerdos con buen seso who look for their salvation, versus el omne de mal seso (74c et pass.) who seeks ceasely after sexual adventure.

On the evidence, then, of the connotations of travar and seso vano throughout the LBA, the verse yo travé luego de ella e fabléle en seso vano suggests that the protagonist made a crudely physical pass at the old bawd. It would not have been necessary to spell out the rest of the scene to Juan Ruiz's audience, because they would already have known from popular tradition that such old hags were supposed to be gleefuly complaint in such situations. The only question was which of the two characters was to become the greater butt of the joke.

From the old woman's next comments it becomes evident that the joke was on the protagonist. She was apparently unhappy with her suitor's performance, because she proceeds to berate him with (946b): Açipreste, más es el roido que las nuezes, a common proverb (Combet), which functions here as the key syntagm of the joke, analogous to súpome el clavo echar in the Cruz episode. On one level the proverb suggests simply ‘you promised more than you could deliver,’ but, once again, the semantic field of deceit carries suggestive overtones. This is achieved by reinterpreting the key term of the syntagm, nueces ‘nuts,’ in its very common popular meaning ‘testicles.’¹⁰

The use of the term ‘nuts’ to connote ‘testicles’ is so commonplace in so many languages and in so many periods that it hardly needs documentation. However, two medieval tales, one French and one German, are particularly relevant analogues because, as in our passage, in both the whole plot is centered on the same vulgar double entendre ‘to crack nuts/copulate.’ In the French fabliau, La dame qui se venja du chevalier (Montaiglon VI. 24-33), a knight, as he is about to have sex with his lady, “cracks” a most uncourtly joke, asking her: Ma dame, croitriez vous noiz?, where croistre noiz ‘copulate.’ Such language is of course absolutely inappropriate for a courtly lover and the insulted lady instantly withdraws her favors and sets out to plot a revenge to avenge her dishonor. In the thirteenth-century Von dem Ritter mit den Nüzzen (Von der Hagen: 227-81) a husband's unexpected return forces his wife to hide her lover in the bed. The husband brings home hazelnuts, which he pours into his wife's lap, from where the two proceed to crack and eat them while the lover is still hidden in the bed. The husband thus graphically acts out his impotence, by showing he is capable of ‘cracking nuts’ in his wife's ‘lap’ only literally. Even closer to the case of our protagonist is Sebastián de Horozco's insult poem to an impotent man, full of synonymous expressions for his incapacity, including: que no bastó para armar/buena gafa y par de nuezes (Weiner 69, no. 64).

Just as in Horozco's use of nuezes, there can be little doubt that the invective más es el roido que las nuezes hurled by the angry old woman at the Archpriest protagonist is an insult on his sexual prowess and thus more than sufficient provocation for his obscene comic rejoinder, now unfortunately lost to us. The interchange is a carnivalesque set piece, characteristic of what Bakhtin (16, et passim) dubbed the familiar abusive language of the marketplace, where the insults and abuse serve as a grotesque debasement of the body to the “zone of the bodily lower stratus.” Such curses, always uttered in their traditional form, grammatically and semantically isolated from context, are complete units, something like proverbs, and, as Bakhtin suggests, can be considered a special genre of billingsgate. Here the comic sexually-charged exchange of invectives, which makes up most of the embryonic episode, appears to be an already familiar set piece to the author and his audience, judging by its resemblance to, for example, the insults in the French adaptation of the Vetula.

THE UNNAMED ‘DUEñA CUERDA’

Significantly, the old hag is not the only one to accuse the Archpriest of an insufficiency of nueces. A variant of the same accusation—(102b) chica cosa es dos nuezes—is made even more obviously, in this case, by a sexually attractive female, an unnamed dueña (who may, to add to the humor, possibly be a nun; see, for example, Willis (“Archpriest:” 246). This passage, although parts of it are present in the 1330 version, is as enigmatic as the briefer episode with the old woman and made more so by a confusing later interpolation. The episode has, nevertheless, received little critical attention. Willis (“Archpriest:” 246), one of the few scholars to have considered it, wonders why it was chosen as the start of a fictional autobiography when it is “neither piquant nor edifying.” I hope to demonstrate that it is definitely the former.

The dueña's contradictory reactions to the Archpriest's advances in this episode (st. 77-104) are so incoherent that they can only make sense as a joke, consisting of the parodic acummulation in one story of every possible complication and dénouement available to the genre. Willis (“Thirteen Years:” 222) suggests that the “glaring contradiction” in the original narrative was caused by the incongruous insertion of two strophes (90-92), but, in fact, the episode is quite absurd even without the interpolations.

The first strophe (77) declares that the dueña in question granted the protagonist buena fabla e buen riso but no more. There follows a lackluster stock description of the lady's beauty, talents, and refinement and the statement that she was so guarded that the protagonist was unable to spend even an hour with her. He sends her a cantiga, missing from the text, for which the lady unaccountably berates the as-yet-unnamed mensajera, threatening her with violence if she comes back. She reinforces this threat with the tale of the lion who split open the head of a wolf who had tried to deceive him.

There follow the contradictory interpolated passages which declare instead that the love affair went sour because the love secret (poridat) was found out and the girl was subsequently heavily guarded. The lover never got to see the girl again, about which, contrary to her earlier reaction, she was so upset that she asked him to compose a sad song for her. This song is also missing in the text but the narrator says that she sang it in her pain. In contrast, in the following two strophes a third and contradictory reason is offered for the lack of success of the affair: that it broke up because mescladores accused the lover falsely of having bragged about his conquest in public.

In her anger the lady tells another fable, of the earth which bellowed loudly but gave birth to a tiny, laughable little mole. However, in both the introduction (93) and the moral of the fable (101-102) it is obvious that the lady's story about the puny mole has nothing to do with the forementioned mescladores but is directed, like the old bawd's anger, at the bragadaccio and inadequate performance of many men”¹¹

97 a Quando quiere casar omne con dueña muy onrada,
b promete o manda mucho; desque la ha ganada,
c de quanto le prometió, o da poco o da nada;
101a E bien assi acaeçe a muchos e a tu amo
b prometen mucho trigo e dan poca paja-tamo
.....102a omne que mucho fabla faze menos a vezes;
b pone muy grand espanto, chica cosa es dos nuezes

Here we have two proverbs in the moral, prometer trigo e dar paja-tamo ‘to promise wheat and deliver chaff,’ and chica cosa es dos nuezes, and once again both mean ‘to deceive’ but the key terms of each syntagm are simultaneously susceptible to erotic reinterpretation.¹²

Words for ‘seed’ and the seed of various grains are and have traditionally been conventional and widespread to mean ‘ejaculation’ and, by metonymy, ‘phallus’ (as in Eng. medical sperm and semen, Sp. grano, trigo, avena, OFr. semence, avoine; Sp. hacer un polvo), both because of the analogy between the fecundity of seeds and sex and the female body seen as the field to be tilled, and by the further analogy between bread production—grinding grain, sifting flour, kneading and baking bread—and copulation.¹³

The potential ambiguity of deception and sexuality of the proverb is also exploited in sexual jokes in other languages, as in the fabliau Du prestre et d'Alison (Montaiglon 1877 v.320ff.), where both vendre paille pour graine and pour le forment l'orge are used to describe the trick played on a priest, who paid dearly to deflower a twelve year old girl but ended up in bed with an old woman instead. Similarly, in La Veuve (Livingston) a rich widow who is going around looking to buy herself a young husband, says that when it comes to sex, she has no mind to go “without seed and take the chaff.”

What makes the second proverb in the episode, chica cosa es dos nueçes, also spoken by the dueña cuerda even more obviously hilarious than the old hag's similar más es el roido que las nuezes is that cosa ‘thing’ and all other terms of extreme generality, such as ‘nothing,’ ‘nothing,’ ‘part,’ ‘place,’ and various neuter pronouns can serve as either euphemism or, alternately, as a type of ostentatious disphemism to substitute via lexicalized ellipsis for the taboo names of the sexual organ of either sex. Compare Lat. rem habere ‘copulate,’ Fr. (faire) ça, çela, faire la chose, machin, machine, truc, engin, rien; Sp. lo, aquello, cosa, It. dolce cosa (Decameron III.10.25); Fr. belle chose (Cant. Tales, Prol. to Wife of Bath's Tale 447, 120ff, the Wife's reference to her own sexual organ); Eng. it, thing ‘pudend/penis,’ e.g., in multiple attestations in Shakespeare (Partidge), and Hamlet's insults to Ophelia's nothing (Pyles).

The ambiguous play on the traditional obscene connotations of cosa in also exploited in numerous Golden Age poems. For a particularly humorous example vid. ¿qué cosa es cosa?, attributed to Góngora (Alzieu: 85), a series of riddles posed by the poet to a dama graciosa, the answer to all of which is the sex organ of one or the other sex. Cf. also the “Libro de diferentes cosicas” (Alzieu 298-303), where each of twenty cosicas suggest, by twenty distinct ambiguous riddles, descriptions of sexual organs, but the answer to each, written out backwards, turns out to be innocent items, like a thimble, candle, or sieve, the joke being to trick the audience into imagining a suggestive answer. Cf. also “Dámelo, Periquito …” (Alzieu: no. 83), where the whold game is to allude to the organs of both sexes via juguete, cosa and the equally vague neuter pronouns lo and aquello:¹⁴

Dámelo, Periquito, pero
Periquito, dámelo
Dame aquello que tú sabes,
y yo te daré otra cosa
para jugar muy donosa …
Si me lo das, te lo doy …

The dueña's insult also plays on the potential ambiguity between chica/poca cosa as an adverbial expression ‘little bit” and as a noun phrase meaning ‘small thing/organ’ (of either sex). The same game is used to advantage in a Golden Age seguidilla (Alzieu: no. 134) in praise of the hidden parts of ladies, which are parodoxically very small, yet have the capacity to contain great/big things:

Lo que admiro es que en una tan chica parte
Caber pueda mi gusto, siendo tan grande.
Yo estoy siempre bien quisto de todo el pueblo,
por ser hombre que en pocas cosas me meto

where the last two verses can mean ‘I am admired all around town for minding my own business’ or, ‘for being a man who can “stick it in” anywhere.’

In humorous stories it is not uncommon to repeat a variant of the punch line, to make sure that the audience gets the joke. It is then no surprise that in the recapitulation of his misadventures with the dueña, the Archpriest as narrator rephrases the girl's insult (104a): tomó por chica cosa aborrencia e grand saña, which can be understood either as ‘she got mad because of a trifle,’ or ‘she got mad because of a small phallus.’

The dueña's evaluation of the Archpriest's chica cosa is by no means an unusual case of medieval female sexual aggressiveness. Male self-praise as well as debates over the relative sexual attributes of different men were commonplace in bawdy poems and stories, with females often actively voicing their preference for well-endowed partners. For example, in a fifteenth-century French farce, Ragot, Musarde et Babille, Musarde says that men are always boasting about their attributes (Je l'ay si grant, j'en ay autant) but when it comes to actual measuring, their boasted quatier turns out to be ung petit doy ‘a little finger’ (Hindley: 16; Bowen: 334). In Spanish the theme is even more explicit in the series of three ritualized insult poems between Baena and Villasandino in the Cancionero de Baena. Villasandino, calling himself señor de Logroño, propositions a woman, whom he addresses as Señora, flor de madroño (with both peculiar epithets serving to anticipate a climactic rhyme with coño) and brags about his mango gruesso e yerto which measures nine or ten inches. Baena replies, ostensibly on behalf of the lady, insulting the size of Villasandino's organ as más floxo que bledo, in fact, so small the with the smallest breaking of wind the lady would expell it (ed. Michel: 103-04). Similarly, in English, in the Roxburghe Ballads a lecherous girl, on closer investigation, judges a tailor's yard ‘measuring yard/phallus’ to be inadequate (Wehse 226):

She, seeing him dismaid,
She took his yard in hand:
“Is this your taylor's measure?
It is too short for me,
It is not standard measure.”

Also commonplace is the related theme, as in the LdA, that men who boast about their sexual prowess are precisely the ones who are not able to perform. This is the punchline of another French farce, an erotic exploitation of the proverb “doing is better than saying,” where a woman whose husband is unable to satisfy her agrees to try the skills of two workmen, Dire ‘Say” and Faire ‘Do,’ on her ‘orchard/pudendum’ (Vasvari Onomastics: 11-13). Dire, who talks all the time, can do nothing, while Faire says nothing but goes to work, satisfying her three times (Bowen: 334, 341).

The final strophe of the dueña cuerda episode (104), interpolated in the 1343 version, which announces one more now missing cantiga, continues with still another vertical hidden game in the rhyme words alva, mal va, and malva (for an interpretation different from mine, below, vid Morreale “Apuntes:” 259):

mandé que gelas diesen de noche o al alva
non las quiso tomar dixe yo: ¡”muy mal va!
al tiempo se encoge mejor la yerva malva.”

Alva could be a hint that the poem to follow was a burlesque alba, with a homophonously named heroine (Walsh: “Genesis”). There exists, in fact, a Galician-Portuguese poem attributed to King Don Diniz, in which alva signifies both ‘dawn’ and a ‘doncella blanca,’ suggestively washing clothes by the river (see Reckert: 16). The joke in malva is that in folklore yerba malva (also malvada/mala, or enconada) has the attribute of causing women who step on it to become pregnant, as in Berceo's Milagros XXI, where the abadesa encinta … piso … yerva fuert enconada (see Devoto 1974: 11-46). The modern version of the same belief is the sanitized “la soltera que lo pisa al año estará casada.”¹⁵ The yerba mala's phallic associations probably come about because it is characterized by quick growth, as in the proverb la yerba mala ayna cresce (Combet). However, the sexually humiliated Archpriest-narrator emphasizes at his own expense instead the weed's opposite tendency, to encogerse ‘shrink, contract, detumesce’!¹⁶

.....

What I have proposed here may seem to be repetitious and based on a fixation with the sexual act, where every semantic field seems to be reinterpretable to refer to copulation. This is, to a degree, precisely what I have wanted to illustrate—that the humor of the Cruz episode can help us reconstruct the identical humor of two lost songs because all are based on popular sexual humor. All are characterized by the obsessive repetition of the same sexual themes expressed through conventionalized pan-European metaphors. Hence, popular expressions referring to deception, echar el clavo, más es el ruido que las nuezes, poca cosa es dos nueces, prometer trigo y dar paja tamo all mean ‘to deceive’ and can all be reinterpreted with negative sexual connotations, just as today in different parts of the Hispanic world terms for copulation, joder, la joda, chingar can connote ‘perjuicio, molestia, impedimento’ and related concepts.¹⁷

Obscenity, although it is a device of rather limited emotional range, can present unlimited verbal possibilities with which to approach the uncomfortable and the forbidden in a humorous way. The most basic forms of laughter and the ridiculous are about another's misadventures and humiliations and physical and especially sexual inadequacies, where special targets are the ugly, and old, the stupid, and the inept. Sexual frustrations can be due to taboos of a specific culture or to the ‘inherent frustration of sexuality itself—the perennial problems of sexual opportunity, potency, rivalry” (Muscatine: 109).

The LdA is rich in all of these forms of humor, for example, the grotesque exaggerated bodily proportions of the serranas; various forms of humiliation of the lover, by a bad-willed go-between in the Furón episode, by sexually dominant females in the serranas, by the go-between stealing the girl in the Cruz episode, and, most ludicrously of all, by the protagonist's own incapacity to perform with a young girl and an old hag. The fun for poet and audience alike was that the subtle game of insinuations in the poet's language “wouldn't have startled a tender-eared novice nun [while] the initiated could get a special kick by perceiving the double-entendre.”¹⁸

Notes

1. Walsh (“Missing Songs:” 1) estimates that there is, conservatively, reference to at least 22 missing songs (if we assume only two lacunae wherever the reference is in the plural). Menéndez Pidal thought that copyists removed the offending lyrics, although in the places where songs are announced but missing there are nevertheless no missing pages in the manuscript (Corominas: 92b). Castro's explanation (cited in Corominas) that the songs never existed but that their mention was merely a formula inherited from the maqamat is untenable, given the parallelism of these episodes with the Cruz episode, which has conserved one of its two announced lyrics. Willis (“Seedbed:” 224) suggests that songs might be absent because Juan Ruiz might have added different versions at each performance from memory. (For a detailed bibliography of critical opinions, vid. Marmo: 86, n. 75).

2. Not all critics accept the two-redaction theory (for detailed bibliography on this question vid. Willis “Seedbed:” 215.n.2 & Marmo: 17, n. 12 & 13). While I take no strong position on this issue here, for convenience I will refer to the longer version as the 1343 expanded version and to the shorter variant as the 1330 “original” version. My own view is closest to that of Morreale (“Más apuntes:” 307): “no niego que haya habido una pluralidad de versiones. Lo que dudo es que fueran exactamente dos.” This would also explain how there could be missing lyrics and yet no corresponding lacunae in the 1343 manuscript. For an interpretation diametrically opposed to my own, see Gybbon-Monypenny, who believes that the author's aim in the later redaction was “to reiterate and emphasize [the work's] moral purpose” (221).

3. For various approaches on reconstructing garbled texts through remaining fragments, vid. Clarke, who shows that the brief self-contained episode of the mora in the LdA can be shown through metrical reconstruction and thematic coincidences to be a romance; Chevalier (193) who also traces Portuguese and Brazilian versions of the tradition of the vieja enamorada, which I discuss below; and Wardropper (1964) on the reconstruction of folk lyrics which have become incomprehensible or “barren.”

4. (Out of my great grief I wrote this burlesque song; if any lady hears it, let her not disdain me because of it, for I should call myself stupid and more than an ass if I did not compose a mocking song/found a joke from such a big joke on me.) All quotes and English translations (except when otherwise noted) are from the edition of Willis.

   Narrative disclaimers are metacommunicative devices that comment on the performance to follow, most often serving to warn the audience that a rule of appropriateness involving taboo subjects is about to be broken (cf. Edwards). For another example, compare the Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer as narrator warns his audience that the Miller's Tale to follow is a cherles tale in which harlotrie is tolden, and recommends that squeamish skip both it and the Reeve's Tale: turn over the leef and chese another tale (I 2177). In a further disclaimer of responsibility, Chaucer then has the Miller himself announce at the beginning of his tale that he is drunk and thus can't be held responsible for what he is about to say.

5. So convinced was Corominas that in his edition he was tempted to emend 945b vínome ver una vieja to la mi vieja. He had to admit, however, that he could not justify doing so because the reading in manuscript S, the only one to contain the passage, is clearly una vieja. He nevertheless proceeded to provide a convoluted explication of the passage which is dependent on just this assumption. More interestingly, Lecoy (28, n.1; 358, n.1), who termed the piece obcene but insignificant, did hint that it could be an allusion to an intrigue that the protagonist had with the old woman. This idea, which was ridiculed by Corominas, has received support in more recent scholarship only from Catalán and Peterson (68), who suggest, in addition, that the old woman scolds the narrator because of his failure to satisfy her sexually. Willis (“Seedbed:” 223.n.17) disagrees but does make clear that, although the old woman is associated with the type of an old bawd (946c estas viejas rrahezes), she is not Trotaconventos, nor is her function in the episode that of a go-between.

6. Cf. also the protagonist's misadventures at the hands of his male go-between Don Hurón, which begins: 1618a salida de febrero e entradada de março, and also the deflating spring exordium in the episode of the dos perezosos (Vasvari: “Hurón,” “Suitors:” 187).

7. (Out of all these troubles and all this annoyance I composed burlesque songs, and out of all the bad things she said to me; let the ladies not turn away from them nor consider them trash, for no lady ever heard them who did not laugh at them heartily.

   Ladies, I beg you, by our kindness, for your forgiveness, since you may be sure that I did not intend to earn your displeasure, for I would die of sorrow; please allow this bit of foolishness among words of wisdom … the courteous listener should have his pardon ready).

8. Libidinous and bibulous old women appear as the butt of jokes in countless other medieval works, as well as in earlier tradition (on which, vid. Richlin: 109-116). Cf. examples in la vieille in the French sottes chansons (Bec: I. 160-1; II. 99-102); the portrait of a noire vieille in a Provençal poem by Raimon de Cornet (Nelli: 334). Compare also the fabliau La vieille truande (Montaiglon V, 171-78; Eichman & Duval: nu. 24) which depicts an old misshapen beggarwoman sitting by the side of the road who falls in love at first sight with a handsome and courtois young knight whom she immediately propositions in courtly terms; the author adds that although the hag was not “belle Aude” she tried to make herself attractive by smearing herself with herb ointments because she will wanted to lead a wordly life. In Spanish cf. the detailed gloss of the proverb no ay muger bieja / de la çinta abaxo in Horozco's proverb collection (Alonso Hernández Teatro: no. 2048).

   Perhaps the only idea more sexually ludicrous than inflamed old women are younger men who are willing to consort with them because they don't have any other sexual outlet. An early allusion to this defect is the insulting name Johan rasca viejas, dated 1247 (Frago García: 261). An example of similar humor appears many centuries later in Moratín's Mi amigo y Juana la alcahueta (Fábulas futrósoficas 31.9-24 [quoted in Cela]), where a customer in a house of prostitution, unable to contain his excitement long enough to wait for the girl he had come to visit, settles in desperation for quick release with the more than willing old madame, whom he dubs a virgin per non usum for the occasion.

9. On trabar see, for example, the lion who clawed out his own heart (315b), the dog who clawed his master (1704d); the devil who rips into or bites lustful sinners (415b, 420b, 1474c, 1475c). Compare also the dominatrix serrana, who brags: ‘quando a la lucha me abaxo / al que una vez travar puedo / derriból’ … (When I get down to “wrestle,” once I grab my man I knock him down … [trans. mine]), where abaxo, travar, and lucha are all sexually charged terms. Similarly, when the old bawd fails after some effort to procure a viuda loçana for the protagonist, the narrator describes her failure with the words (1320b): mas non pudo trabar, atar nin dar nudo, meaning ‘she could not charm the young widow with magical spells,’ but where the semantic field of holding and tying, including trabar, atar, (dar) nudo, lazo, soga, cordón all allude simultaneously to magic rituals and to the sexual act (see multiple examples in Herrero: 143; and Alzieu 1983: no. 25.65, no. 13, var. 4, et passim.).

10. Compare the passage where Trotaconventos entices Endrina to come to her garden for a tryst with Don Melón (861d): jugaredes e folgaredes e darvos he ¡ay, qué nuezes! where, in addition to the nuezes, the bawd promises seven other varieties of spherical nuts and fruits, all with traditional erotic connotations.

11. (When a man wants to “marry” a very honored lady, he vows and promises great things; but after he has won her, he gives little or nothing of what he promised her. …

    And just so it is with many men and with your master: they promise much wheat and give [a] little chaff … [though] it can cause a very big fright, a pair of nuts is a small thing.) On the ambiguity of casar in the passage below see Corominas: n. to 761d.

    Michael (187) claims that while the usual moral for this Aesopic tale is “appearances deceive,” this version has “only a tenuous connection with Juan Ruiz's requirement,” and that the moral is instead “broken promises.” On the contrary, my interpretation of the two ambiguous proverbs makes both morals simultaneously appropriate. In fact, most appropriate would be the interpretation “people who promise to do great things often don't do anything,” already present much earlier in one of the versions of Phaedrus of this tale (Schwarzbaum: 531).

12. Compare Sp. zanquivano, zanquivano, mucha paja y poco grano (Combet) and the Eng. proverbial phrase to sift to the bran, or to take the flour and leave the bran. Both bran ‘the husk of the grain separated from the flour after grinding’ and chaff ‘the husks or other seed coverings or small pieces of stem or leaves of grains or grasses, separated from the seed in threshing or processing’ are used across languages in traditional society to connote something light, worthless, or useless.

    On the contrast implied in trigo … paja see the still current proverb mal amigo deja la paja y llévase el trigo (Pérez Contel 1971: 24).

13. For detailed documentation, see Vasvari (“Semiología:” 321; “Miller”), and, below.

    In the LdA there occur three other common proverbs containing the word trigo, both with equvocal connotations. The first occurs in the deceived protagonist's lament in the Cruz episode, where he says that he had sent a go-between to the bakergirl Cruz with a promise of his trigo añejo but instead the messenger (118cd): a mi dio rumiar salvado / el comió el pan más duz.

    Trigo is also used equivocally in the protagonist's pilgrimage to the sierra, where he claims to be wanting to (950a, d) provar todas las cosas el apostol manda … quien más de pan de trigo busca, sin seso anda, where pan de trigo is likely identical to the Wife of Bath's use of barley bread as ‘pudendum.’ (Compare the “straight” use of the proverb in: Alex. non quisiese buscar mellor de pan de trigo; Berceo, Mil. Tu andas buscando meior de pan de trigo (O'Kane 1959).) The Archpriest is here misapplying St. Paul by the ellipsis of quedarse con lo bueno, which should follow provar todas las cosas. The Wife of Bath misconstrues St. Paul in the same way in her analogy between herself and barley bread, where she compares young girls to “bread” of pure wheat seed and herself to barley “bread.”

    Compare also 170b sembrar avena loca Ribera de Henares, on one level a proverbial expression meaning ‘to waste time,’ but also (like the Eng. to sow wild oats) an erotic reference to Gen. 38.8-10, where Onan refused God's wish that he impregnate his brother's wife and instead semen fundebat in terram, that is, he masturbated. The obscene interpretation of the metaphor can be traced to “Si linguis angelicis” in the Carmina Burana.

    Similarly equivocal in Spanish folkloric texts are the following sayings (Cejador y Frauca: no. 287, 288, 351, 61): Mucho trigo tiene Gonzalo, mas está gastado; mucho trigo tiene Rodrigo, mas está comido; no me entréis por el trigo, buen amor; el villano va a sembrar ¡Dios se lo deje gozar! Compare also the Lozana andaluza, where Lozana's pimp and boyfriend is called Trigo.

    For additional illustration in English of the widespread and protracted erotic connotations of grain and seed, and their relation to weed, compare also the popular tune sung in Dorset and West Country Village pubs well into this century, which early collectors found the verses too crude to publish, a clear indication that the chiefest grain, wanton seed, etc. would clearly have still been understood by the general public (Sharp 1974: 197-99):

    As I walked out one spring morning fair,
    To view the fields and take air,
    There I heard a pretty maid making her complain,
    And all she wanted was the chiefest grain,
    the chiefest grain
    And all she wanted was the chiefest grain.

    (The poem continues for two more strophes in a similar vein, with the wanton seed substituted for the chiefest grain.)

14. For an analysis of cosa in the Libro from a different semantic focus, see Morreale (“Chica cosa”).

    In another variant of Dámelo Periquito … (Alzieu: no. 84) the juguete which solteras, viudas, and casadas (compare the same stock formula in LdA 231d) demand tiene un sabor mas dulce que pan y nueces, where pan and nueces has the same connotations as documented above.

15. See Devoto (11-46); compare also Schneider and Romeu Figueras (II, no. 351), where la niña first steps on the hierbabuena and then on the calabaza (on the erotic symbolism of the quick growing cucurbits in folklore see Vasvari: “Onomastics:” 14, 11-20) while in conversation with a caracol, another folkloric phallic symbol (because of its retractable antennae). In Alvar (nos. 165, 165a) the borraja and una piedra dorada have the same effect. Compare also Reckert (35) on the sexual symbolism of malva.

16. On encogerse ‘contract’ compare 56c, in the episode of the Greeks and the Romans, where the ribaldo sticks out three fingers con otros dos encogidos so that his threatening gesture resembles a harpoon, or, alternately, a phallus and testicles (cf. also 1414c).

17. On the equivalence of deception/copulation, see Guiraud; Zlotchew: 46-47; Vasvari “Semiología:” 317-18.

18. I want to thank Prof. R. S. Willis for offering valuable suggestions on this paper. This last quote is from his personal correspondance.

    I also wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Senior Research Fellowship during the academic year 1988-89, which made part of this paper possible.

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