The Captive

Who He Is

The Captive is the captain who arrives at the inn in chapter XXXVII of Part One with a veiled Moorish woman, Zoraida, and who, at the request of Don Fernando and of those who heard the gentleman discourse on arms and letters, tells his own life as one who promises a true account and not an invention (chapter XXXIX of Part One). Only in chapter XLII of Part One is he given his full name, Ruy Pérez de Viedma. He was born in the Mountains of León, the son of a father who divided his estate among three sons and sent each of them down a road of his own (the Church, the sea, or the royal household); he took the road of war, served the Duke of Alba in Flanders, became captain at Lepanto, was taken captive when he leapt onto the enemy galley, passed through captivity in Constantinople, in Navarino, and in Algiers, and from there fled with Zoraida, who first wrote to him from the top of a window. He wants freedom, his own and hers, and a return to his father and brothers; he fears that his brother the magistrate will be ashamed of a poor captain; he knows about war, captivity, and ransoms; and he is perhaps mistaken in accepting the renegade's plan instead of the one Zoraida proposed. He spends the book at an inn where everyone recognizes one another, and the novel places him between the gentleman who has just finished his speech and the magistrate who is his brother.

Trajectory

In chapter XXXVIII of Part One, the gentleman closes at the table his discourse on arms and letters, and the word soon passes to the true soldier, who promises to tell a life. In chapter XXXIX of Part One, with the silence he asked for, the captive begins in the first person: his father, held to be rich, would have been so in fact if he had known how to keep his estate as he knew how to spend it, and he wanted to deprive himself of the instrument of spending. He calls his three sons aside alone and proposes a Spanish saying:

The father translates the saying into three callings, letters, trade, and war, and makes clear what each one yields: whoever wants to be worth something and be rich should follow the Church or the sea, and war, which does not bring much wealth, usually brings much worth and much fame. He wants to free himself from what makes him a spendthrift without appearing a bad father, and he does it with long and carefully considered reasons, so that the sons will not take him for a stepfather. The captive chooses war, the second brother the Indies, and the youngest the Church or Salamanca. He then tells the story of Lepanto from the reverse side:

The victory the world has grown disillusioned with is the one that chains him, and among those who won it are fifteen thousand Christian oarsmen set free. The sentence is built in pairs (sad and happy, captive and free), and he does not complain about what he did, the leap onto the enemy galley, which he recounts as a duty. It may be lament, or the measure of a man who knows he took part in a victory that left him out. In Constantinople he sees his master made admiral of the fleet, rowing at Navarino, the loss of La Goleta and its fort, and he names Don Pedro de Aguilar, an ensign and a poet, a captive like himself, whom fortune took to his galley and his rowing bench; one of the three who smile at the table is Aguilar's brother, who lives in his place, rich and good, married, with three children. The captive says, as one speaking of himself:

The sentence is said about someone else and holds true for the one who says it: a captive who was free only a few days ago, who has just recounted the leap onto the galley, the rowing bench, and the price in gold and in risk that his freedom cost him. The three who smiled knew about Aguilar's brother what the captive did not, and the coincidence is the first of a night of recognitions that the book does not hide.

In chapter XL of Part One, describing the cruelties of his master, who each day hangs one man, impales another, and cuts off the ears of a third, he interrupts his own account to praise a Spanish soldier whom that master never beat:

The captive names the soldier by his surname, as one points to someone the listeners might know, and leaves the account for later. Otto Maria Carpeaux, in History of Western Literature - 5.6 - Anti-Baroque, places Cervantes among the soldiers of Philip II and the captives of the Moors:

Saavedra is the author's second surname, and he too was a captive of the Moors in Algiers. The text does not say the soldier is him: it says the captive praises him and leaves him out of the account, and it is only through the surname that the reader can hear the author there. Then the captive tells of the fishing rod that moves over the courtyard of the bath: a very white hand, a cross made of reeds, forty gold crowns, and a paper in Arabic. The renegade from Murcia translates what the girl writes:

The girl chooses a knight among the Christians she has seen through the window and leaves it to him to decide on marriage, since Lela Marién will find her a husband if he does not want her. She does not know how to escape, only that she wants to go, and she asks for secrecy out of fear of her father, who would throw her into a well. The initiative is entirely hers: the money, the flight, the choice of the captive; his part is to respond. He answers that he will marry her as a good Christian and that Christians keep their promises better than Moors. When Zoraida proposes that he ransom himself and return with a boat, everyone wants to be the one ransomed, and the renegade objects:

The renegade speaks of a case he has seen: leading captives who sent a ransomed man to find a boat in Christian land and never saw him return. At the same time, the plan he proposes makes him the owner of the boat, and the captive, who would have preferred to send for the boat in Majorca as Zoraida had said, does not dare contradict him, for fear that he will denounce them. The renegade's reason may be prudence, and it may be the desire to command.

In chapter XLI of Part One, the renegade buys a boat, and the captive chooses twelve Spanish oarsmen. He goes to the garden of Agi Morato on the pretext of gathering herbs, and Zoraida throws an arm around his neck and walks toward the house with faltering steps, just as her father sees them:

Zoraida decides in an instant and changes what her father saw: what would have been proof of intimacy becomes the faint of a girl frightened by Turks. The captive follows her gesture without having been warned. During the escape, when the father, who embraces her, discovers that she is a Christian, she replies that she is a Christian, but not the kind that put him in this state, and she refers her father to the Virgin:

The girl separates two things that her father joins: being a Christian and having put him in the power of the enemy. What he does next, throwing himself headfirst into the sea, suggests that he heard her words as a sentence. Rescued and set on land with the Moors at the cove of Cava Rumía, he shouts from afar for her to return, that he forgives her everything, and Zoraida, when he can no longer hear her, answers:

The father gave two reasons that take her away from the faith, profit and licentiousness, and she answers with a third, the haste of her soul, which he cannot see. By saying that the Christians owe nothing to her will, she affirms that the decision was hers and makes herself the agent of the escape, not the captive.

In chapter XLII of Part One, the captive falls silent, and Don Fernando offers his brother, the marquis, as godfather at Zoraida's baptism. At nightfall a magistrate and a young woman arrive at the inn, and when the captive sees the magistrate, his heart leaps: it is Juan Pérez de Viedma, the brother who followed letters. Here the order of the two younger sons is reversed compared with what the captive said earlier: the magistrate, of letters, appears as the middle son, and the youngest is in Peru. He takes aside Don Fernando, Cardenio, and the priest, and asks their advice on whether to make himself known or first find out whether his brother, seeing him poor, would be ashamed or would receive him with a good heart. The priest takes the test upon himself, and at supper he tells the magistrate, as though he were hearing it from a comrade in Constantinople named Ruy Pérez de Viedma, the story of the father, the war, Lepanto, and Zoraida. The magistrate sighs and his eyes fill with tears:

The priest set up the detour to learn whether the brother would be ashamed of the poor captain, and the magistrate answers that question without knowing it was asked: he says he would go and look for him, and at his own cost. The captain, standing apart, notes every movement of his brother. The priest, seeing that the test has turned out as the captain wished, takes Zoraida by the hand, with Luscinda, Dorothea, and the magistrate's daughter, and the captain takes her by the other, and he tells the magistrate to stop weeping, for before him he has his good brother and his good sister-in-law. The captain runs to embrace his brother, who puts his hands on his chest to look at him from a little distance, and when he recognizes him, embraces him so tightly that those present are moved to tears. Meanwhile Don Quixote watches in silence:

The gentleman who has just weighed arms and letters falls silent before a story of arms, captivity, and letters, and he absorbs it in the only language he knows. The text allows two readings: the world offers events that only chivalry knows how to read, or the captive's account, which claimed to be true, is itself written like an adventure from a book, and Don Quixote recognizes the genre. They agree that the captain and Zoraida will return with the magistrate to Seville and inform the father, so that he may come to the wedding and the baptism; the fleet sails from there in a month for New Spain.

Themes Embodied

The Captive is Freedom and Oppression seen from below, from the rowing bench and the chain. The book gives him the only story of freedom that costs something: the victory that chains him, the ransom paid with another's money, the escape in which the woman is the one who decides. The freedom that Marcela claims by her own will (chapter XIV of Part One) he lost through war and recovers through Zoraida's initiative. What freedom erases, according to the renegade, is the obligation of those who have been freed (chapter XL of Part One).

In Love, the initiative belongs to Zoraida: she writes first, decides the plan, changes what her father saw, and takes charge of the flight. The captive responds, and the book keeps him in the background of his own love story. The contrast is with the stories of Cardenio and Dorothea, in which love is lost through a broken word: here it is the promise kept, that of the knight who vows to marry as a good Christian (chapter XL of Part One), that saves the scene.

In Language and Narration, the captive is the account that calls itself true. He promises to tell a life and not an invention (chapter XXXIX of Part One), and the book both confirms and contradicts him: the account has the form of captive novels, the window, the reed, the Moorish woman who writes, and the gentleman, who hears it, reads it as a chivalric chimera (chapter XLII of Part One). The soldier Saavedra, praised in the middle of the account, lets the author pass through the story without the text saying it is him (chapter XL of Part One).

Divergent Readings

The book presents two readings of the renegade's plan, and neither is refuted. The renegade speaks of a case he has seen: leading captives who sent a ransomed man to find a boat and never saw him return. The text also shows that the plan makes him the owner of the boat. The captive, out of fear that he will be denounced, does not contradict him. It may be the renegade's prudence, it may be his desire for command, and the doubt decides whether the captive was deceived or merely kept silent (chapter XL of Part One).

Zoraida's motives also admit two readings. The father gave two reasons that take her away from the faith, profit and licentiousness; she answers with a third, the haste of her soul, which he cannot see. Whoever reads the escape as a conversion sees a Christian who never wanted to do harm to her father; whoever reads it as a choice of order sees a woman who decides for herself (chapter XLI of Part One).

Readings also differ on what the captive's story does in the book. Whoever reads it as a moral pause sees the life of a soldier that contrasts with that of the gentleman, the real war beside the imagined one. Whoever reads it as one more fiction sees the novel telling another adventure from a book, with the same elements the priest and the barber know how to handle: the disguise, the detour, the revelation (chapter XLII of Part One). Against the first reading, it is worth remembering that the gentleman does not distinguish the two and absorbs them in the same language; against the second, that the account is laden with facts that a real soldier would keep, Navarino, La Goleta, Tunis (chapter XXXIX of Part One).

Relationships

• Don Quixote: the knight who listens to it in silence and absorbs it in the language he knows (chapter XLII of Part One), after having discoursed on arms and letters (chapter XXXVIII of Part One).
• The Priest and the Barber: the priest who takes the brother's test upon himself and leads it through the detour (chapter XLII of Part One).
• Dorothea and Cardenio: those who listen, advise, and accompany the priest when he leads Zoraida by the hand at the moment of recognition (chapter XLII of Part One).
• Marcela: the other figure in the book who speaks of freedom, but by her own will and in solitude (chapter XIV of Part One).