SOURCE: Ricapito, J. V. “Love and Marriage in Guzmán de Alfarache: An Essay on Literary and Artistic Unity.” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1968): 123-38.

[In the following essay, Ricapito examines themes of love and marriage in Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, concentrating on the affair of Guzmán's mother as a pivotal episode in Guzmán's own unhappy love life.]

Critics, in evaluating the concept of love in the picaresque genre, have uniformly noted its absence or decreased importance as a literary theme. In one of the first modern critical commentaries on the picaresque, F. W. Chandler underscores the absence of sentiment in the picaresque novel and also notes that, in the case of Pícara Justina, “Love bears a direct proportion to wealth …” In the Spanish picaresque novel, women are usually depicted as inconstant, and love and marriage are generally submitted to the picaro's mercenary schemes. This particular presentation of love in picaresque literature, he further notes, is intimately linked with humor.¹ For Romera-Navarro, the picaresque genre barely found room for a theme like love, unlike its literary predecessor, the books of chivalry. He notes that the pícaro “… burlador unas veces, es también a menudo burlado, casi siempre por mujeres.”² S. Gilman emphasizes the absence of love in the pícaro's life,³ as does L. Pfandl, who notes as well that the pícaro is in no way a Don Juan or a drunkard.⁴ In his discussion of the picaresque novel, S. Gili y Gaya states that noble and elevated values, love and sentiment, are out of the pícaro's reach. Ordinarily there is no room for these themes. When they are treated one finds them in un-picaresque, interpolated material.⁵ No mention is made of the particular treatment given to love in the picaresque genre in so attractive a title as F. Díaz-Plaja's El amor en las letras españolas.⁶ Repeating some earlier remarks by Menéndez Pelayo, Díez Echarri and Roca Franquesa note that the pícaro “… es temperamentalmente casto; es un misógino. Si alguna vez (en la novela picaresca de protagonista femenino) aparece el elemento amoroso, es sólo para atrapar incautos. La ‘pícara’ no está enamorada; ‘es garduña de Sevilla’ o ‘anzuelo de bolsas’.”⁷

With reference to the themes of love and marriage in Guzmán de Alfarache, which will be studied in this present essay, Chandler notes how Guzmán “… believes he has matriculated in the school of Cupid yet he admits that after all he is the creature of a blind instinct …”⁸ Gilman states that “… love could not form an integral part of the picaresque vision, or, rather, absence of love made the picaresque world possible, allowed the pícaro to retreat to his lonely watchtower there to comment on its falseness and deceit.”⁹ Moreno Báez highlights the frequent attacks on women in the Guzmán and the uniformly negative vision of love and marriage. (He does not, however, believe that Alemán merits the charge of misogynist since men are submitted to the same negative treatment.) Marriage, like so many other life involvements, Moreno Báez states, must be placed in God's hands to insure success.¹⁰ Álvarez notes that Guzmán's youthful, bungling adventures in love are due to his immaturity and lack of experience.¹¹ Guzmanillo turns to women for reasons of passion and also considers them for their overall usefulness. In the service of the French ambassador he courts the favors of various women for his master but does not try to woo them himself. In his first marriage the woman is drawn to him, not vice versa, and his marriage is a failure. This experience allows for bitter and negative commentaries on women and marriage. For Álvarez, Guzmán is constantly victimized in love and his experiences are destined to failure. His activities with women usually coincide with his periods of affluence and when other more important matters do not interfere. His contact with women is “momentáneo” and usually with negative results. These negative results, Álvarez states, “… fueron formando un substrato que adquirió forma cuando tuvo un trato largo con una, su esposa …”¹² Guzmán's love for Gracia “… corresponde a un plan superior de su vida y creemos es normal. Es el final de un período de renunciación …”¹³ The abominable events of Guzmán's second marriage are, according to Álvarez, a result of Alemán's wish to present a uniformly base vision of life in this area of human experience.

A study by Fr. T. Hanrahan, S. J., focuses on women in Guzmán de Alfarache, and he also broaches the subjects of love and marriage.¹⁴ For Fr. Hanrahan, in Guzmán:

El amor no significa una entrega libre de la voluntad, sino también de los sentidos, lo cual hace que se equivalgan el apasionamiento y el amor. El influjo de la concupiscencia está exagerado, junto vemos una corriente de ascetismo platónico que quiere superar a todo lo que no sea espiritual. En el matrimonio el papel íntegro del amor conyugal está excluido, y se restringe el matrimonio a uno sólo de sus fines principales: la continuación de la especie, que no es el fin de un matrimonio particular, sino de la institución del matrimonio en general. El placer y el amor humano no tienen lugar.¹⁵

He also notes an autobiographical element in the presentation of love: “… Su preocupación [Alemán's] con el influjo del pecado original y su insistencia en la ceguera del instinto, indican un temperamento pasional que tuvo sus dificultades con la concupiscencia …”¹⁶ However, it must be noted that in his book Fr. Hanrahan does not study all the female characters that appear in the Guzmán. Like Moreno Báez before him, Fr. Hanrahan makes the following assertion concerning the connection between some Italian novelle and the interpolated tales in the Guzmán: “Cuatro son las novelitas intercaladas en el Guzmán. Una es traducción de Massuccio [sic], otra ‘Dorido y Clorinda’ [sic] es tan italiana que parece imposible que sea Alemán su autor. …”¹⁷ This statement is essentially repeated again: “En el Guzmán, esta noble señora [la dueña] aparece varias veces; en la ‘Historia de don Luis de Castro y don Rodrigo de Montalvo,’ donde por cierto ejerce sus artes, pero como importación italiana, traducción de Masuccio, la dejamos. …”¹⁸

Also commenting on the presence of an autobiographical element in Guzmán, Díez Echarri y Roca Franquesa note that Alemán seems to be much more at home in a Neo-Stoic atmosphere than in a Neo-Platonic one.¹⁹

All of these opinions offer valid insights of varying degrees, but no one, in my estimation, has elaborated an aspect of the themes of love and marriage in the Guzmán which I believe is of singular importance. I refer to the meaning that Guzmán's mother's affairs has for Guzmán, the subtle psychological repercussions that this experience will have for him, and the subsequent artistic presentation of love and marriage that evolves from Guzmán's awareness of and attitudes concerning this experience. I shall outline Guzmán's significant involvements and experiences in love to show that his amorous experiences correspond on the one hand to Alemán's wish to devaluate all positive values; and on the other, that these experiences are linked with the mother's adventure which produces Guzmán. Essentially, there is subtly expressed throughout the work the pícaro's understanding of the relationship that produces him as well as a fantasied ideal, the opposite of his mother's experiences. This essay will seek to prove this intuition.

While the first truly significant love-marriage episode in the work deals with the mother, we are, however, informed of the marriages and affairs of both the father and the grandmother. Guzmán's father, we are told, becomes a renegado during his capture in Moslem territory, during which time he conveniently takes a Moorish wife. When he decides to escape, he deceives and robs the woman and returns to Christian territory. Here love is presented as a convenience, where the amada is reduced to a mere object, the victim of the levantisco's opportunism. The episode is casually narrated, and there is no evidence that the father felt the slightest tenderness for the woman nor any human solidarity with her. This episode is also the incipient point in the trajectory of the themes of love and marriage which will later end in an extremely ironic way for Guzmán.

The second episode of these initial experiences refers to the grandmother, who is presented as a super-enchantress, a woman who has surpassed the mother in the area of love and deception. The mother, as we shall see, truly has someone from whom to take example. The phrase which most aptly describes the relationship between mother and daughter can be found in Rojas' La celestina, who is a literary type that the grandmother greatly resembles. Celestina tells Pármeno: “… pues tienes a quien parezcas …”²⁰ The grandmother is depicted by Guzmán in the following way:

Si mi madre enredó dos, mi abuela dos docenas. Y como a pollos—como dicen—los hacía comer juntos en un tiesto y dormir en un nidal, sin picarse los unos a los otros ni ser necesario echalles capirotes. Con esta hija enredó cien linajes, diciendo y jurando a cada padre que era suya; y a todos les parecía: a cuál en los ojos, a cuál en la boca y en más partes y composturas del cuerpo, hasta fingir lunares para ello, sin faltar a quien pareciera en el escupir …”²¹

We see, then, a non-positivistic kind of determinism operative in the mother's life.

The marital experiences of both father and grandmother represent a pre-history for the treatment of love and marriage in the work. These experiences of collective pre-history give a qualitative indication of life prior to Guzmán's advent into the world. It will be no different from the world we shall witness in reading the Guzmán; and we can assume, no different from any life after it. This basic “existential” notion is later stated in the following way:

Este camino corre el mundo. No comienza de nuevo, que de atrás le viene al garbanzo el pico. No tiene medio ni remedio. Así lo hallamos, así lo dejaremos. No se espere mejor tiempo ni se piense que lo fue el pasado. Todo a sido, es y será una misma cosa. …²²

The experiences of the father and the grandmother possess a negative, generic symbolic value in terms of the work, as well as an immediate, particular value for Guzmán, and together with his mother's experiences they will supply him throughout his life with a perspective for the values of love and marriage.

The mistress of a rich, old man beset by illnesses, the mother meets and is attracted to a younger man. Their relationship takes place in the beautiful gardens of San Juan de Alfarache. Feigning illness, the mother is brought into her newly-found lover's house where the relationship is consummated. The old man is made to wait, being kept in total ignorance of what is going on inside the house where the mother is supposedly recuperating. The old man unknowingly helps matters by demanding that there be no noise near the house while his mistress “recovers” from her illness, and in doing so subjects himself to the reader's devaluation, debasement, and ridicule. He becomes before our eyes a “marido” burlado, the first and the prototype of a number of such characters that appear in the work. (References to the older lover as “father” and “marido” are justified on psychological as well as literary grounds. For Guzmán, the older man fulfilled the father role for him, and this would therefore support any view of the huerta episode as “adultery”—“… y por la cuenta y reglas de la sciencia feminina, tuve dos padres [italics mine] … Ambos me conocieron por hijo: el uno me lo llamaba y el otro también … así cada uno lo creyó y ambos me regalaban. La diferencia sola fué ser, en el tiempo que vivió, el buen viejo en lo público y el extranjero en lo secreto, el verdadero …” I, 93-94). Artistically and structurally, Alemán presents in this episode a typically picaresque exterioridad: interioridad dualism, the covert but successful attempts of the Genoese at the mother's honor, and the blissful ignorance of the old man who accepts reality and experience at unilateral face value. After the initial episode in the huerta the mother conveniently continues the illicit relationship until the old man dies and then she marries the Genoese. The predominant ingredients of this experience with her first lover are deception, convenience, and bad faith. At this early stage of the narration Guzmán passes severe judgment on his mother and on all women who deceive in this way:

… Mas la mujer que a dos dice que quiere, a entrambos engaña y della no se puede hacer confianza. Esto se entiende en la soltera; que la regla de las casadas es otra. Quieren decir que dos es uno y uno ninguno y tres bellaquería. Porque no haciendo cuenta del marido, como es así la verdad, él solo es ninguno y él con otro hacen uno; y con él otros dos, que son por todos tres, equivalen a los dos de la soltera. …²³

Immediately after the description of his mother's “adultery” Guzmán provides us with an insight into his view of ideal love. Having already described the nature of his mother's relationships with both men, Guzmán offers us his definition:

… Pero amor corre por otro camino. Ha de ser forzosamente recíproco, translación de dos almas, que cada una dellas asista más adonde ama que adonde anima … El amor ha de ser libre. Con la libertad has de entregar las potencias a lo amado; que el alcaide no da el castillo cuando por fuerza se lo quitan, y el que amase por malos medios no se le puede decir que ama, pues va forzado adonde no le lleva su libre voluntad.²⁴

With this insight, which establishes a ser and deber ser polarity, Alemán can now narrate his interpolated tale dealing with Ozmín and Daraja.

Having given the reader an understanding of what Guzmán had before him in terms of his mother's adventures, with “Ozmín y Daraja” Alemán juxtaposes the world of deception and adultery with ideal love, ideal characters, ideal behaviour; a picture of love constantly put to the test and which never falters in the face of temptation. Alemán may have provided Spanish literature with some of its most beautiful pages with this Moorish tale, but I do not believe that his ultimate purpose consisted in merely making of his tale a tour de force. Artistically Ozmín and Daraja rather represent the world of Guzmán's wish fulfillment: not the ser of his mother's behaviour, but the world of querer ser—as well as deber ser; the world and people as they should be. The earlier statements concerning reciprocal love represent the essence of the relationship between Ozmín and Daraja. Alemán describes their love in the following way: “Era el amor igual, como las más cosas en ellos y sobre todo un honestísimo trato que se conservaban. …”²⁵ In this sense Ozmín and Daraja represent, unlike the mother and her husband, the incarnation of ideal love.

After the narration of the heavenly world of Ozmín and Daraja, Guzmán experiences a series of victimizations,—which bring us back to reality—and begin with his being tricked into buying a jewel which two ladies claimed they lost. In one episode, one of the ladies, the “criada de cierta señora casada …,”²⁶ solicits the attention of Guzmán for her mistress; in the other Guzmán is victimized by a Cordovese couple who pretended to be brother and sister. After having provided supper for the girl Guzmán is made to wait in a dirty tinaja when her brother unexpectedly arrives and suspects foul play. This is followed by Guzmán's experience with a young lady who promises to come to his room late at night. Rather than the arrival of the accomodating lady, a borrica comes to his sleeping place. When seen in totality the three experiences represent, as it were, a cycle of adventures which culminate in the ridiculous, serving as an absurd postscript to the ideal, exotic world of Ozmín and Daraja.

Having had his character humiliated and deceived through attempts at love, Alemán now begins the following chapter with a tirade against love:

Como si el amor no fuese deseo de inmortalidad causado en un ánimo ocioso, sin principio de razón, sin sujeción a ley, que se toma por voluntad, sin poderse dejar con ella, fácil de entrar al corazón y dificultoso de salir dél, así juré de no seguir su compañía.²⁷

With the interpolated tale of Dorido and Clorinia the reader has before him a number of aspects of love, e.g., ideal love and practical love, deshonra and ideal honra, faith in love, victimization in love, and an idyllic love situation reduced to absurdity and tragedy. It will be recalled that Clorinia vows love for Dorido and rejects Oracio, who in a fit of vengeance cuts off her hand at the wrist. Dorido avenges the affront by marrying Clorinia, then killing Oracio. This tale reveals to the reader both threads of ideal love and conduct and its opposite, a naturalistic, bitter treatment of love and vengeance. To Dorido's ideal behaviour—his hasty marriage to the wounded, dying, dishonored Clorinia and his vengeance as marido agraviado—Alemán juxtaposes a concept of love as tragedy, unlike the treatment given to Ozmín and Daraja. Through the tragic figures of Clorinia and Dorido on the one hand and Oracio on the other, he also presents the anti-heroic—and picaresque—notion of the price one may have to pay for love. At the end of the story the reader is left with the vision of the garroted body of Oracio. The reader cannot help but experience an accompanying feeling of distaste if not disgust to all that has preceded Oracio's murder. The tragic consequences, one must state, all came about in the name of love.

Guzmán goes into the service of the French ambassador, whose greatest vice, we are told is love. At this point Guzmán, having himself felt the sting of love, is in a position to comment cynically with some experience on the subject:

¿Mas qué diré agora de nuestros amos tontos, pues les debe de parecer que por nuestra mano corre bien y con secreto su negocio? Real y verdaderamente conozco que no hay ciencia que corrija un enamorado. No hay en amores Bártulos, no Aristóteles ni Galenos. Faltan consejos, falta el saber y no hay medicina, pues no hay camino para mayor publicidad que nuestra solicitud. Porque a dos visitas nuestras y un paseo suyo lo cantan luego los muchachos por las calles.²⁸

To the “fictional” world of the interpolations Alemán presents others of carne y hueso who participate intimately in the development of Guzmán's life thus giving to these experiences a sense of immediacy and a touch of literary realism. His service with the ambassador provides Guzmán with some unpleasant amorous experiences and at the same time introduces the motif of Guzmán as pander. At this stage of his experience, when he is completely involved in a life of vice, it is not beyond him to procure for others. Later, as we shall see, Guzmán will prostitute his second wife, bringing to a dramatic and dishonorable climax the themes of love and marriage.

The symbolic transvestite motif, which is the basis of the burla in the tale told by Rodrigo (As it may be recalled, Rodrigo and his lover, the Condesa, have Luis believe that he is sleeping with her husband when in reality Luis is made to spend a long night with a lovely lady), has already been prepared for artistically by a burla played in the Monsignor's house, i.e., a boy is dressed as a girl and is made to come out running from the room of the camarero when the Monsignor is there visiting. Interestingly enough, the boy screams out while running: “Ay, amarga de mí! Voyme señor, que es tarde, por amor de mi marido.”²⁹ The tale of Luis and Rodrigo continues the thematic thread of the marido burlado, the original exterioridad: interioridad dualism. In the Luis-Rodrigo tale the concept of honra is brought to ridiculous conclusions and deception is raised to a level of art. Luis' part of the tale reiterates the bungling and unsuccessful love adventures of Guzmán; Rodrigo's episode harks back to the original model: Guzmán's mother's deception. In fact, there is an even subtler link with this original, prototypic experience. The mother's lover is presented as old, ill, and unattractive. The same archetype husband reappears in the Rodrigo tale as the Countess' husband; in this way Alemán symbolically joins the Rodrigo tale to the narrative proper.

Guzmán goes through two humiliating experiences in his role as go-between and as lover—his paramour was Nicoleta, the scheming servant of Fabia—adding to an already plentiful number of similar victimizations: after waiting in a driving rain he is led into a sucio corral where he spends the night. This experience is deliberately linked by the author to a previous one, where he waits in a dirty tinaja having been victimized by the Cordovese couple: “… Alli pasé lo que restó de la noche, harto peor para mí que la toledana y no de menor peligro que la que tuve con el señor ginovés mi pariente.”³⁰ His second experience deals with a charging pig which attacks Guzmán while he is speaking to Nicoleta. This humiliating experience becomes so well-known that Guzmán is the object of taunts, and these will eventually lead to his dismissal from the ambassador's service. Guzmán offers us another tale in passing which deals with the honorable widow who kills a man who had unjustly impugned her honor. In certain respects this virtuous widow in her beauty resembles Guzmán's mother: “Una señora, moza, hermosa, rica y de noble linaje …”³¹ Cf. the description of Guzmán's mother: “… Ella era gallarda, grave, graciosa, moza, hermosa, discreta y de mucha compostura. …”³² The widow's assailant hoped that by disgracing her in the eyes of others she would marry him to save her honor. After carefully and secretly preparing for her admission into a convent she marries the man and then murders him in his sleep; she then repairs to the convent. This seemingly unaccounted-for tale continues the thread of ideal types and ideal behavior that ended with the Dorido-Clorinia episode. On the one hand, the honorable widow recalls Ozmín and Dorido as ideal types with ideal perspectives of love, the murdered man recalls Oracio, and the story repeats a basic theme of the Dorido-Clorinia tale: the risks one runs in loving and the price one may have to pay for it. Guzmán's laconic comment on the widow's vengeance is: “Líbrenos Dios de venganzas de mujeres agraviadas, …”³³

The next interpolated story is that dealing with Dorotea and Bonifacio. Here Dorotea is raped by Claudio who, by means of a go-between, induces Dorotea to come to his house. Through a trick Dorotea changes places in jail—where Dorotea has been placed by a jealous lieutenant—with the go-between, and Dorotea returns home without Bonifacio's knowing any of the lurid details concerning the abduction. In this story the two threads of ideal types and ideal attitudes concerning love and deception, adultery, and victimization, are cleverly joined. What prevails here is the blissful ignorance of Bonifacio who, at the end of the story, continues thinking that his wife is the purest and most virtuous woman in the world. In this he is like the many other deceived lovers and husbands already met with in the work. The parecer of Bonifacio is momentarily retained as truth and several accomplices fall into disarray or death. Like other cuckolded husbands before him, Bonifacio is thoroughly hoodwinked, but this time by a woman who apparently approximates Daraja rather than Guzmán's mother although Dorotea, because of the final deception, can be placed in a category with the mother. By having a character of Dorotea's virtue give in to Claudio's advances Alemán postulates the possibility of all virtue as being corruptible, which is one of his basic theses. Another important aspect of this episode, one must note, is the artistry of the dénouement: the resolution of the tale in a chiaroscuro of ambiguity, irony, and deception. Like the episode dealing with Guzmán's mother's engaño and the burla-engaño motif of the Luis-Rodrigo tale, here too the action is predicated on the original structural and stylistic exterioridad: interioridad dualism, thus reinforcing the “archetypical” aspect of this episode.

Guzmán is later pickpocketed by two lovely ladies. One of them reveals something about herself which revives the idea of the deceptive, adulterous wife: “‘… que aun soy mujer casada y de buena opinión en el pueblo. No querría perderla; pero parécesme de tal calidad, que cualquiera cosa se puede arriscar por tí.’”³⁵ He is left waiting by a widow; while talking to a young lady he is accosted by a dog which allows for the scatological experience of what he mistakenly thinks is a stone. This series of experiences is remindful of a previous cycle of love experiences which culminate in the visit of the borrica to Guzmán's sleeping place, as well as the two humiliating experiences with Nicoleta. Guzmán later sees the widow who had left him waiting, but this time he rejects her advances, leaving her to other more interested parties.

His next experience is another unpleasant one. Here he meets a grasping young girl of whom he is somewhat enamoured. When Guzmán refuses her some gifts, he finds himself subpoenaed and jailed, having been unjustly accused of rape by her. This experience immediately recalls Dorotea's victimization at the hands of Claudio. But Alemán now offers an explanation of rape which very clearly clarifies the irony and ambiguity of this previous tale:

Porque real. … verdaderamente, hablándola entre nosotros, no hay fuerza, sino grado. No es posible hacerla ningún hombre solo a una mujer, si ella no quiere otorgar con su voluntad. Y si quiere, ¿qué le piden a él? Diré lo que verdaderamente aconteció a un lugar de señorío en el Andalucía.³⁶

and “… No hay fuerza de hombre que le valga, contra la que no quiere. …”³⁷ As ideal a type as Dorotea was, in the final analysis, she is still a far cry from the archetypes of goodness and perfection: Daraja, Fabia, and the virtuous widow. This method of presenting the ambiguous, ironic episode of Dorotea and Bonifacio and later offering an explanation which clarifies this ambiguity is, I believe, a function of the “enseñar desengañando” dimension of the Guzmán. There is a particular impact created in this retrospective judgment; the reader's having to acknowledge disappointedly the crumbling of heroes—or, in this case, a heroine.

There is one cycle of love and marriage left in the work, and this deals with Guzmán's marriages and a final fling at love with a white slave to whom Guzmán is all but indifferent. The first marriage, though possessing a structural autonomy, is a prelude to the second—similar to the two part structure of the Luis-Rodrigo tale. In the first marriage Alemán has Guzmán go through a period of joy and happiness; he then puts the marriage to the test. His wife, being unable to put up with the strain of sacrifice, becomes an unbearable yoke on Guzmán. His unhappiness consists of having to live with the constant jibes and recriminations of a discontent and jealous wife. This unfortunate experience will allow for a long disquisition on love and marriage as well as a discussion of the motives for marriage. Among the various reasons that Guzmán offers as to why young girls marry, one has special significance for the unity of the work:

Cásanse otras para que con la sombra del marido no sean molestadas de las justicias ni vituperadas de sus vecinas o de otras cualesquier personas. Ya ésta es bellaquería, suciedad y torpeza. ¿Qué puede más decir? Son libres, deshonestas y sin honra …³⁸

With this statement Guzmán subtly plants the seed for the “drama” of his forthcoming marriage and his future abominable role as pandering husband. By having Guzmán fail at his first marriage, Alemán has dealt a partial death blow to the themes of love and marriage. With the death of Guzmán's wife Alemán allows himself one further attempt at dealing with this theme; more important, with another marriage Alemán can fulfill certain premises of the initial mother experience, destroy completely the concept of love and marriage, and reduce his central character to complete moral abomination, thus paving the way for his conversion at the end. With only three months left of studies with which to receive his ordination Guzmán decides to marry. Alemán's purpose here is obviously to underscore the height of Guzmán's folly and the absurdity of the lengths one will go to for the sake of love and marriage. Again, in recalling his actions Guzmán bemoans his fate and his victimization in love:

… Es amor una prisión de locura, nacida de ocio, criada con voluntad y dineros y curada con torpeza. Es un exceso de codicia bestial, sutilísima y penetrante, que corre por los ojos hasta el corazón, como la yerba del ballestero, que hasta llegar a él, como a su centro, no para.³⁹

Guzmán goes through the initial stages of joy and happiness, and, like the first marriage, there is a test. This time it is not just the wife who fails, but also the husband. In this episode Guzmán panders for his own wife for their comfort and profit. Having procured for the French ambassador, Guzmán is certainly experienced enough to pander for himself. Accosted by the law, they return to Seville where Guzmán continues with a dishonorable existence which culminates in two episodes: returning to see his mother and his wife's flight to Italy with her new lover. With Guzmán's pandering for his own wife and her subsequent abandonment of him, Alemán inexorably destroys the possibility of any meaningful human contact and union, having drawn his characters to a moral point which is itself unpardonable and an extreme from which they cannot withdraw. Love is literally buried and with it marriage as a concomitant institution.

His affair with the white slave brings to a close the initial circular pattern opened by the father's crass opportunism with the Moorish woman whom he married for convenience. It also marks the last stage in Guzmán's career as lover, and is characterized by callousness and indifference, untempered even by the slightest sense of love or tenderness: “[the white slave] Dábame dineros que gastase, sin que yo tampoco supiese al cierto de dónde los había, quién o cómo se los daba. …”⁴⁰

It would be valuable at this point to study the place of Guzmán's mother in the presentation of love and marriage during the latter part of Guzmán's experiences. Coming back to Seville after a long absence, Guzmán is reunited with his mother. I do not believe it is entirely fortuitous that Guzmán's second wife abandons him during the time that the couple is living with Guzmán's mother. By abandoning him, Guzmán's wife is symbolically repeating the mother's act of “abandonment,” i.e., abandoning the old man for a sexual liaison with the Genoese. With the mother present when Guzmán is abandoned this final ironic twist becomes reinforced. In essence, Guzmán is equated with and becomes the original marido burlado character whom the mother gulled, and of which relationship Guzmán is a product. The original thread established in the relationship which conceived Guzmán in sin is now completed, and it is done with impact and force.⁴¹

The introduction to Guzmán's family background, the sine qua non of all picaresque accounts, then, is not casual narrating but one of the most powerful basic forces in Guzmán's life and the novel. The concepts of love and marriage that are developed throughout the work are derived from this initial deception: the reality and awareness of a dishonest, dishonorable betrayal, and the wish for ideal comportment. Love and marriage as practiced by his mother is communicated early to Guzmán as a basic modus operandi, a modus which consists of deceit, convenience, and bad faith. Instead of simply leaving her lover—(Cf. I, 78-79) the idea is not altogether impossible, since Guzmán's wife had no compunction about leaving him—the mother was content with carrying on an illicit situation purely for convenience's sake like her husband, the levantisco, in his first marriage; and she marries the Genoese only after the old man dies, and is no longer of any use to her.⁴² Love and marriage, as practiced in his immediate circunstancia vital, as intrigue, convenience, and falsity, are assimilated into Guzmán's consciousness at an early age and will remain with him until he becomes, ironically enough, the same marido burlado that the author has been presenting throughout the novel both in the narrative and in the interpolated material. Guzmán's destiny is, in a sense, a self-fulfilling prophesy that begins with his mother's deception. She will also be, in part, the unconscious model for many women in Guzmán's life. Daraja, Fabia, and the virtuous widow stand accusingly in the work as the deber ser—a wish fulfillment—and for Guzmán the querer ser of all feminine conduct, a model against which all women in his life can be compared.

Alemán's notions of love as revealed through Guzmán's experience and the narrator's comments could be formulated in the following way: Ideal love, which is reciprocal and equal and is based on honest and honorable trato (Ozmín and Daraja). Victimization in love, which is brought about by an excess of passions and/or inexperience (Guzmán, Clorinia, Oracio, the French ambassador, the man killed by the virtuous widow). Marriage, a sacred institution ordained by God, to be placed in God's service, but an institution, more often than not, rent asunder and perverted from its original intent by the couples themselves (Guzmán's mother and grandmother, Guzmán and Gracia, Dorotea, the woman who, with Luis, tricks Rodrigo).

Structurally and stylistically the constant repetition of experiences dealing with unfortunate loves and deceptive marriages correspond to a technique which could be called baroque and which Guzmán himself outlines:

Yo también he ido tras de mi pensamiento, sin pensar parar en el mundo, Mas, como el fin que llevo es fabricar un hombre perfeto, siempre que hallo piedras para el edificio, las voy amontonando. Son mi centro aquestas ocasiones y camino con ellas a él. Quédese aquí esta carga, que, si alcanzare a el tiempo, yo volveré por ella y no será tarde.⁴³

Far from being isolated and sporadic references and experiences, love and marriage correspond to a plan of development carefully laid by the author which corresponds on the one hand to a generic negative vision of the world which envelops and embraces the whole work, and a particular one which is a part of the central character's intimate psychological structure and was caused by the single, most central experience of Guzmán: the circumstances surrounding his birth and early life.

Notes

1. F. W. Chandler. Romances of Roguery. Part I. N.Y.: Macmillan, 1899, see pp. 66-68; 71-74.

2. M. Romera Navarro. Historia de la literatura española. Boston, N.Y.: Heath, 1928, pp. 216-217.

3. S. Gilman. “An Introduction to the Ideology of the Baroque in Spain,” Symposium, I (1946), 82-107, see especially pp. 100-101.

4. L. Pfandl. Historia de la literatura nacional española en la edad de oro. Trad. del alemán por el Dr. Jorge Rubió Balaguer, segunda edición. Barcelona: Gili, 1952. See p. 294.

5. S. Gili y Gaya. “La novela picaresca en el siglo xvi,” in Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas. Vol. III. Barcelona: Barna, 1953. See pp. 84-85.

6. F. Díaz-Plaja. El amor en las letras españolas. Madrid: Nacional, 1963.

7. E. Díez Echarri y J. M. Roca Franquesa. Historia de la literatura española e hispanoamericana (segunda edición). Madrid: Aguilar, 1966. See p. 224a.

8. F. W. Chandler, op. cit., p. 67.

9. S. Gilman, op. cit., p. 101.

10. E. Moreno Báez. Lección y sentido del Guzmán de Alfarache. Anejo XL. Madrid: RFE, 1948. See pp. 153-162.

11. G. Álvarez, El amor en la novela picaresca española. El Haya: Van Goor Zonen, 1958. See pp. 16-33; 120-133. (See also his essay, Le Thème de la femme dans la picaresque espagnole. Groningen, Djakarta: Walters, 1955.)

12. Ibid., p. 132.

13. Ibid., p. 132.

14. T. Hanrahan, S. J. La mujer en la novela picaresca de Mateo Alemán. Madrid: Turanzas, 1964.

15. Ibid., p. 123.

16. Ibid., p. 124.

17. Ibid., p. 85, n. 140. E. Moreno Báez, op. cit., p. 181.

18. Hanrahan, op. cit., p. 95.

19. E. Díez Echarri y J. M. Roca Franquesa, op. cit., p. 255a.

20. F. de Rojas. La celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. México: Leyenda, 1947, Act VII, p. 137.

21. M. Alemán. Guzmán de Alfarache. Ed. y notas de S. Gili y Gaya. Madrid: Espasa Calpe (Clásicos Castellanos), 1953, I, 98. Quotations and references to passages in Guzmán taken from Gili y Gaya's edition will be referred to by volume and page.

22. Ibid., II, 167.

23. Ibid., I, 94.

24. Ibid., I, 85-86.

25. Ibid., I, 181.

26. Ibid., II, 122.

27. Ibid., II, 135.

28. Ibid., III, 107-108.

29. Ibid., II, 263.

30. Ibid., III, 155.

31. Ibid., IV, 107.

32. Ibid., I, 75.

33. Ibid., IV, 110.

34. Ibid., IV, 122.

35. Ibid., IV, 196.

36. Ibid., IV, 213.

37. Ibid., IV, 215.

38. Ibid., IV, 255.

39. Ibid., V, 51.

40. Ibid., V, 113.

41. Another detail in this episode which recalls Guzmán's early life is the association between the mother and Guzmán's second wife. Here the original relationship between the grandmother and the mother is repeated with the mother now acting in the “teacher” role originally played by the grandmother. Once again, one sees postulated the “cyclical” nature of evil and human experience. See note 22.

42. The word “love” is used with regard to Guzmán's mother's subsequent marriage to the Genoese: “Mi padre nos amó con tantas veras, como lo dirán sus obras, pues tropelló con este amor la idolatría del qué dirán, la común opinión, la voz popular …” (I, 95). However no mention is made of any similar substantial reaction by the mother. There is no doubt that for Alemán the earlier relationship with the older man is thematically of greater meaning for the work; he devotes approximately 45 pages to that relationship while he devotes only 5 pages to the marriage situation with the levantisco. In this regard another point is to be observed. When Guzmán leaves home he forms a cognomen from those surnames which in his own eyes best define and identify him: “… y para no ser conocido no me quise valer del apellido de mi padre; púseme el Guzmán de mi madre, y Alfarache de la heredad adonde tuve mi principio …” (I, 101); which, while pointing to a rejection of the Genoese, underscores the importance of the roles of the older lover and the huerta episode in his life.

43. Ibid., III, 187.