I learned a lot of Jewish history growing up – slavery in Egypt, the Temples and their destruction, millennia of exile, the Holocaust. Compared to all that, the Spanish Inquisition and its depredations barely got a mention. It wasn't until I read "La Celestina" that the horrors of those years really got to me.
Not that this book has anything to do with the Inquisition – not literally, anyway. Indeed, most of its length is pretty funny. We'll get to the influence of the Catholic Church's tortuous relationship to Spain's Jews and their descendants (such as the author of this work in particular) a bit later, though. For right now, let's have a look at this quite unique bit of literature.
We begin with a man named Calisto who chases his falcon into a garden, where he catches a glimpse of the beautiful but virginal Melibea. He falls in love with her on the spot – or he calls it love, at any rate, though it's obviously more fleshy than otherwise. Melibea pronounces herself terrifically offended by everything he says and sends him packing.
He spends the next few days bemoaning his fate, to the endless annoyance of his household staff, until one of his servants gets an idea that might earn a nice reward, or at least might get Calisto to shut up. He offers to go see an old witch of a woman in the neighborhood – Celestina - who might be able to help.
This Celestina is a real piece of work. Not only does she have the reputation of a straight up sorceress (a reputation which she might actually deserve), she spends most of her time arranging sexual liaisons between various women and men who can pay, including clergy. She specializes in repairing maidenheads with a needle and thread (ouch) before the women thus treated get married. On top of all this, she looks like a witch, complete with wrinkles and whiskers. Needless to say, she's very popular and respected in town.
She agrees with a couple of Calisto's servants to get him into Melibea's favor for a share of whatever he pays her, and she's eminently successful by means of a spell. Complications ensue, of course, to such an extent that the last chapters take a downward turn that gave rise to the author's categorization of the work as a "tragicomedy" – probably one of the first such ever published.
It's not just this mixed category that renders "La Celestina" unique, though. Its style is unique too. The prose is almost entirely in dialogue, so much so that it's occasionally hard to figure out who's speaking at any given time, but it did make turning it into a stage play easier in later years. So why didn't the author simply write a play to start with? Hard to know, but he did claim that he didn't write the first chapter himself. According to his own testimony, he found that chapter somewhere, and thought it so compelling that he continued the story, finishing his work in about two weeks – all while studying law at the university in Salamanca, Spain.
There's also the fact that the Church doesn't make a very good showing in "La Celestina" – just about every character in it, including clergy, emerges as a first-class hypocrite. Other social hierarchies fare no better. Servants constantly complain about the abuse and limited rewards they receive at the hands of their "superiors," parents barely notice what their children are really up to, and the lust for gain rules over all. No one is honest, everyone's a coward, there's no loyalty even among thieves. Yeah, it's funny – at least at first – but behind the laughs there's a blackly cynical spirit, which in some ways is actually quite refreshing when set against the merely rhetorical virtue of the surface. All you really need to read is the response of Calisto (maybe the most honest character of the bunch) when someone asks him if he's still a Christian ("I'm a Melibean", he says) to understand just how important God and religion really are to this nominally Christian world.
Which brings us back to the environment that the Inquisition produced, which in turn gave rise to "La Celestina". Fernando de Rojas, the author, was the son of conversos – former Jews who converted to Catholicism to save themselves from rejection, torture, and death. As I was taught, and as we learn in this edition's scholarly introduction, the society of the time never really trusted these "new Christians", subjecting them to endless investigation, trial, and occasional torture. This was the fate of some of de Rojas' relatives, including his father-in-law. In other words, the depraved, cynical, black world behind the laughs of "La Celestina" is the world de Rojas lived in. Short as it is, "La Celestina" seems to be the only work of fiction this author ever produced, and no wonder.
I've probably made this work sound practically unbearable. It's anything but. It's funny when it can be, and emotionally quite stirring at other times. Read and enjoy – just step lightly, lest you crash through the shiny surface to the unpleasantness below.
Benshlomo says, Sometimes you don't want to look too closely at the funny stuff – you may find out it's not as funny as you think.
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