Who She Is
Altisidora is the maiden of the dukes' castle who, in Part Two, pretends to fall in love with Don Quixote. She is one of the ladies of the house and plays a part the dukes gave her: that of the spurned maiden of a chivalric romance, who loves the knight more honest than the gold of Arabia, is refused, and dies of disdain. The book shows her in four main scenes: the one in which she sings beneath the grille, with her friend Emerencia (chapter XLIV of Part Two), the one in which she faints before the gentleman (chapter XLVI of Part Two), the one in which she accuses the knight who is leaving of theft (chapter LVII of Part Two), and the one in which she dies of a lie and is revived by Sancho's lashes (chapter LXIX of Part Two). In the role, she wants the knight's love; in life, she fears what the role does not foresee; she knows how to sing and knows the style of the romances the gentleman has read; and she is mistaken, or the farce deceives her, when one word too many slips through her voice. The gentleman reads her as adoration and answers with his firmness toward Dulcinea, and it is this misunderstanding, calculated by the dukes, that the book makes us laugh at and leaves in view.
Trajectory
In chapter XLIV of Part Two, before the four maidens of the duchess who are to help him undress, the gentleman calls them thorns that prick his soul and raises a wall between his desires and his honesty, to keep his decorum toward Dulcinea; the duchess yields and even praises him. When he takes off his shoes, twenty-four stitches of a stocking come undone, and the narrator exclaims over the gentleman's poverty. At night he opens a barred window over the garden and hears Altisidora and her friend Emerencia, who advises her to sing softly; Altisidora swears that since this stranger entered the castle she has known only how to weep. She plays a harp and begins a romance:
¡Oh, tú, que estás en tu lecho, entre sábanas de holanda, durmiendo a pierna tendida de la noche a la mañana, Oh, you who lie in your bed, between sheets of holland, sleeping with your leg stretched out from night until morning.
The verses have the form of those the gentleman has read, the maiden who asks the knight more honest than the gold of Arabia, and they distort it here and there: Dulcinea is a plump and healthy maiden, and what the girl wants is to be in his arms, or at least beside the bed, scratching his head and killing his dandruff. Two readings: a parody the book makes of the courtly romance, by mixing Tarpeia with the age of fourteen years and three months, or a piece by the duchess's ladies, written in the grammar of romances to catch the knight who awaits her. The gentleman, having heard the song, says to himself that he is destined to be such an unfortunate knight-errant that no maiden who sees him can help falling in love with him, and he asks the queens and empresses to let Dulcinea triumph:
para sola Dulcinea soy de masa y de alfenique, y para todas las demás soy de pedernal; para ella soy miel, y para vosotras acíbar, for Dulcinea alone I am of dough and sugar paste, and for all the others I am of flint; for her I am honey, and for you, bitter aloes.
The gentleman speaks to himself, and Altisidora does not hear him, but the speech shows how he reads the scene: queens, empresses, and maidens of fourteen or fifteen press upon Dulcinea, and he is the prize she must defend, come what may. The sentence that opens it, that there is no maiden who sees him without falling in love, is what the books have guaranteed him. Two readings: fidelity put to the test, which lasts come what may, or the vanity of a knight defending himself against a siege that the books have guaranteed him.
In chapter XLVI of Part Two, in the morning, the gentleman dresses in chamois, puts on his traveling boots to hide the disgrace of his stockings, and goes with great pomp to the antechamber where the dukes wait. In a gallery Altisidora and her friend lie in ambush, and she feigns a faint at the sight of him. He says he knows what causes such accidents, and asks for a lute to be placed in his room: with it he will console the lamenting maiden as best he can, because at the beginning of love, quick disillusionments are usually excellent remedies. At eleven at night he finds a viol in the room, tunes it, opens the grille, and sings a romance he composed himself, in which cloistered maidens have honesty as their dowry, knights woo the free ones and marry the honest ones, and the image of Dulcinea is painted on his blank tablet in such a way that it is impossible to erase it. He closes the romance with firmness:
La firmeza en los amantes es la parte más preciada, por quien hace amor milagros, y asimesmo los levanta, Firmness in lovers is the most prized part, for through it love performs miracles, and also raises them up.
The gentleman sings for the maiden who hears him and for the lady who is not there, and what he puts above all in the romance is not love but firmness. The remedy he promised in the afternoon, the quick disillusionment, now comes in verse, before an audience he does not see: the dukes and nearly the whole castle listen. Two readings: a sincere profession of a faith he has not learned to exchange, or a refusal in the form of a display, in which the constant lover appears before the lady to whom he is constant. Among the cats that the duchess releases in his room in the same chapter, one leaps at his face and grabs his nose; Altisidora, with her own hands, bandages him and says in a low voice:
Todas estas malandanzas te suceden, empedernido caballero, por el pecado de tu dureza y pertinacia; y plega a Dios que se le olvide a Sancho tu escudero el azotarse, porque nunca salga de su encanto esta tan amada tuya Dulcinea, ni tú lo goces, ni llegues a tálamo con ella, a lo menos viviendo yo, que te adoro, All these misfortunes befall you, hardened knight, for the sin of your hardness and obstinacy; and may God grant that Sancho your squire forget to whip himself, so that this Dulcinea you love so much never comes out of her enchantment, nor do you enjoy her, nor reach the marriage bed with her, at least while I live, for I adore you.
The maiden joins in a single sentence the punishment of the night, Dulcinea's disenchantment, which she knows depends on Sancho's lashes, and the declaration of love, and she says it in a low voice, close, like someone with her hands on the wound. The role they gave her is that of the spurned maiden, and she plays it with one word more than the hoax required. Two readings: the spite the dukes gave her to say, which she says with relish, or a crack in the role, through which something gets through that does not belong to the staging.
In chapter LVII of Part Two, on the morning the gentleman leaves armed, among the maids and damsels who watch him from the castle, Altisidora raises her voice and sings a poem of repudiation:
Escucha, mal caballero; detén un poco las riendas; no fatigues las ijadas de tu mal regida bestia [...] Cruel Vireno, fugitivo Eneas, Barrabás te acompañe; allá te avengas, Listen, bad knight; hold your reins a little; do not tire the flanks of your ill-governed beast [...] Cruel Vireno, fugitive Aeneas, may Barabbas accompany you; go and fare as you may there.
The refrain invokes Aeneas, the lover who flees Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, and Vireno, a name that comes from Bireno, the unfaithful lover of Olympia in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: the parody works only because the listener already knows the serious model it distorts. The complaint is Altisidora's and, at the same time, the dukes', who turn the farewell into one more scene from a book and, in one stanza, link Dulcinea's disenchantment to the hardness of Sancho's innards. The maiden accuses the gentleman and the squire of having taken three of her headdresses and garters; the gentleman promises to return the headdresses, which Sancho confesses to having, and denies the garters, and he does not touch the love that the poem demands. For him, the only accusation that reaches him is that of thief, which wounds the honor of a knight.
In chapter LXVII of Part Two, the gentleman asks Sancho what God has done with Altisidora, whether she wept over his absence or gave her love-struck thoughts to oblivion, and explains:
mucha diferencia hay de las obras que se hacen por amor a las que se hacen por agradecimiento. Bien puede ser que un caballero sea desamorado, pero no puede ser, hablando en todo rigor, que sea desagradecido [...] Yo no tuve esperanzas que darle, ni tesoros que ofrecerle, porque las mías las tengo entregadas a Dulcinea, there is a great difference between deeds done out of love and those done out of gratitude. A knight may well be unloving, but he cannot, speaking strictly, be ungrateful [...] I had no hopes to give her, nor treasures to offer her, because mine I have given over to Dulcinea.
The gentleman treats the question in the currency he knows, the debt of a knight, and with this he spares himself from saying what he feels. Altisidora loved him, it seems to him, because she gave him the three headdresses, wept at his departure, and cursed him in public, signs that she adored him. Two readings: the consistent courtesy of one who obliges himself not to scorn whoever loved him, or the flattered self-love of one who reads as adoration everything the maiden did in the dukes' farce, a farce that the reader already knows and he does not.
In chapter LXIX of Part Two, the dukes hold her funeral with nearly a hundred torches, a tomb two varas high, and two kings with crown and scepter, Minos and Rhadamanthus. She lies dead in the tomb, crowned with flowers, with a yellow palm in her hands. To bring her back to light, they have Sancho's face marked with twenty-four slaps, twelve pinches, and six pinpricks, and the gentleman offers the same argument he himself accepts, that pain is a virtue. When she stirs and sits up, looking askance at the gentleman, she says:
Dios te lo perdone, desamorado caballero, pues por tu crueldad he estado en el otro mundo, a mi parecer, más de mil años; y a ti, ¡oh el más compasivo escudero que contiene el orbe!, te agradezco la vida que poseo. Dispón desde hoy más, amigo Sancho, de seis camisas mías que te mando para que hagas otras seis para ti; y, si no son todas sanas, a lo menos son todas limpias, God forgive you, unloving knight, for through your cruelty I have been in the other world, in my opinion, more than a thousand years; and to you, oh most compassionate squire the world contains, I give thanks for the life I possess. From today on, friend Sancho, dispose of six of my shirts, which I send you so that you may make six more for yourself; and if they are not all sound, at least they are all clean.
The maiden divides the role into two: to the gentleman, the accusation, which is what befits the scorned lady of a romance; to the squire, the thanks and the payment, which is what interests him. The payment is in shirts, and the offer has the courtesy of one who gives what little she has. Two readings: the graciousness of one who plays her part to the end, or the last mockery of the hoax, which pays the squire's service in shirts and leaves the master with only the reproach. In chapter LXX of Part Two, she tells what she saw at the entrance to hell:
yo no debí de morir del todo, pues no entré en el infierno [...] llegué a la puerta, adonde estaban jugando hasta una docena de diablos a la pelota [...] y lo que más me admiró fue que les servían, en lugar de pelotas, libros, al parecer, llenos de viento y de borra, I must not have died entirely, for I did not enter hell [...] I came to the door, where up to a dozen devils were playing ball [...] and what most amazed me was that they were served, instead of balls, with books, apparently full of wind and fluff.
The object of the game is the book, and the maiden who has just come back to life now says, in the tone of an infernal fable, what the author thinks of a certain literature: paper inflated with wind and fluff, batted about with feet and rackets of fire. What most amazed her, that everyone there grumbles and curses, whether they win or lose, gives the measure of the torment: a game without joy. One of the books, she says, is the Second Part of the history of Don Quixote, not composed by Cide Hamete, but by an Aragonese:
Ésta es la Segunda parte de la historia de don Quijote de la Mancha, no compuesta por Cide Hamete, su primer autor, sino por un aragonés, que él dice ser natural de Tordesillas [...] Tan malo -replicó el primero-, que si de propósito yo mismo me pusiera a hacerle peor, no acertara, This is the Second Part of the history of Don Quixote de la Mancha, not composed by Cide Hamete, its first author, but by an Aragonese who says he is a native of Tordesillas [...] So bad, replied the first, that if I myself set out on purpose to make it worse, I would not succeed.
The condemnation is entrusted to devils, who are the judges of the house, and the first devil's sentence is worth all those Cervantes could give in his own name: the book is so bad that even if one set out to make it worse on purpose, one would not reach it. Two readings: the revenge of an author who finally answers, with the irony that the saying comes from the mouth of an avowed liar, or a way of feigning indifference, since the sentence comes secondhand, through a vision. Don Quixote answers the news with an argument of existence: there is no other I in the world, and the history that goes from hand to hand does not stay in any one of them.
Themes Embodied
Altisidora is Love staged to be refused. The dukes' farce uses the grammar of the romance (the maiden, the grille, the viol, death from disdain) to make the gentleman's fidelity to Dulcinea a public test. The book shows the gentleman winning the test in his usual way, through firmness, and shows the maiden passing from role to a voice of her own in one sentence, that of chapter XLVI of Part Two.
In Appearance and Reality, she is the clearest of the farce's characters: the maiden who dies and is revived to order. The gentleman receives the resurrection as a virtue of Sancho's, though a scruple remains in him about whether the maiden had truly died (chapter LXXI of Part Two). The same house that holds her funeral supplies the viol, the cats, and the bandages.
The theme of Language and Narration passes through her when she tells about hell: the maiden becomes a critic of the rival book, and the gentleman becomes a character who answers the duplicate (chapter LXX of Part Two). The scene is the gesture of a book defending itself against another book: the reply to the apocryphal book that the prologue to Part Two refused to give (prologue to Part Two) comes, after all, from the mouth of a character in a farce.
Divergent Readings
The book offers two readings of Altisidora's love, and neither is refuted. The maiden says to the gentleman in a low voice that she adores him, and the sentence has the form of a line from a staged scene (chapter XLVI of Part Two). The gentleman, later, defeated in Barcelona, reads it as adoration and as a knight's debt (chapter LXVII of Part Two). Whoever reads it as staging sees a maiden who plays her part to the end; whoever reads it as a crack in the role sees a voice that gets through.
Readings diverge on the weight of the hoax. The narrator, in chapter LXX of Part Two, judges it a madness equal to the gentleman's, and the book shows the cost to Sancho (the slaps, the pinches, the pinpricks, chapter LXIX of Part Two) and to the gentleman (the cat, the displeasure, chapter XLVI of Part Two). Altisidora settles the account differently: she comes back to life pretending to have been unconscious, offers shirts to the one who was beaten on her behalf, and goes away, and the book does not say what she felt. Against the reading that she is a mere piece of the farce, it is worth remembering the sentence in chapter XLVI of Part Two; against the reading that she truly loves, that in chapter LXIX of Part Two she speaks her role to the end.
Relationships
- Don Quixote: the knight she sings to and accuses (chapter XLIV of Part Two, chapter LVII of Part Two), and who, firm in his devotion to Dulcinea, reads her as adoring him (chapter LXVII of Part Two).
- Sancho Panza: the squire whose face pays for her resurrection, and to whom she promises six shirts (chapter LXIX of Part Two).
- The Duke and Duchess: those who give her the role, the viol, and the tomb, and who have her sing at the farewell (chapter XLIV of Part Two, chapter LVII of Part Two, chapter LXIX of Part Two).
- Dulcinea del Toboso: the other lady of the story, whom she calls plump and healthy, and on whose disenchantment depends Sancho's lashes (chapter XLIV of Part Two, chapter XLVI of Part Two).
- Cide Hamete Benengeli: the historian who judges the dukes as mad as those they mock (chapter LXX of Part Two).