The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain’s Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn’t have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers. And because, as a writer, he wasn’t held in high esteem. “Don Quixote,” his masterpiece, affectionately known as "El Quijote," pokes fun at almost every aspect of life in seventeenth-century Castile, from the Inquisition to manly courage, from lower-class parlance to literature itself. His humorous eye made the entire country look wretched.
Spain isn’t deterred, though. It is ready to love him, no matter what. Now a group of Spaniards comprised of a historian, a geophysicist, and forensic experts appears to have dug up Cervantes’s bones—and those of his wife, Catalina de Salazar, and several other people, some of them children—in an unspecified grave inside a crypt in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians (Trinitarias Descalzas), in Madrid. The box that contains some of the remains supposedly has the initials M.C. This might be the proof of what the group is looking for, although, truth be told, Spanish orthography didn’t get standardized until later.
Cervantes was almost sixty when the first part of "El Quijote" came out, in 1605. (It would take him another decade to release the second, final part.) His previous work had garnered little attention. He was a soldier and a tax collector, among other things, but literature was his passion. When he wrote the novel, he was getting old and was also losing patience, with himself as well as, quite likely, with Spain. The success of the novel—only posterity would call it a masterpiece—was no doubt surprising. People instantly fell in love with its two protagonists, the pathetic knight and his servant. In Mexico and Peru, adults and children dressed up like them for carnivals.
But the Spanish literary establishment, or at least part of it, was resentful. Lope de Vega, the most famous and prolific comedia playwright of the era and the creator of some of the best sonnets in the Spanish language, badmouthed "El Quijote" before its publication. All of which makes it ironic that Spain now uses Cervantes to sell itself. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza show up on stamps, T-shirts, children’s books, coffee mugs, and watches, and in paintings, comics, and countless other souvenirs. There have been TV and movie adaptations, ballets, operas, and, of course, a Broadway musical so saccharine you think it will give you diabetes. This isn’t terribly surprising, given that "El Quijote" is now not only universally revered but also a perennial best-seller.
In times of trouble, Spain has a special relationship with Cervantes. It reaches back to him for help in sorting itself out. It happened at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Spanish-American War, when the Spanish empire finally collapsed, as Cuba and Puerto Rico added themselves to the trend among former colonies in the Americas by repudiating it and seeking independence (as did the Philippines). At the time, the intellectual élite known as the Generación del ’98—which included, among others, Miguel de Unamuno, who, as a Catholic, obsessed about the religious meaning of almost everything in "El Quijote”_—_found in Cervantes’s creations the fate of the Spanish soul: no matter how misguided your politicians and how often you are ridiculed, these intellectuals insisted, you must stay true to your dreams.
It happened again during the Franco dictatorship, when Cervantes’s masterpiece was the glue that kept the nation’s decaying values together. And it is happening today, as Spain goes through one of its worst crises in recent memory. King Juan Carlos abdicated not too long ago. High unemployment and fiscal collapse not only keep people in a crabby mood but place Spain next in line after Greece as the economy with the most potential to unravel the European Union.
The international attention surrounding the disinterment of Cervantes’s remains is likely to have unexpected side effects. For one thing, readers will get to know him better, which means that factoids surrounding his life will be tested. He is seen as a champion against censorship who was jailed by the Inquisition. Though he did spend time in jail, the charge, in truth, was fraud. And the idealized Dulcinea of "El Quijote" might be a façade for his womanizing. Cervantes married in 1584, when he was thirty-seven and Catalina was nineteen. The marriage lasted thirty years, but Cervantes may have spent only about half of them with his wife. As it turns out, the marriage came just as he had an out-of-wedlock daughter with another nineteen-year-old woman, the result of a night of passion at a tavern.
In other words, he was no saint. Nor should we continue to make him one.
Frankly, there is something creepy about bringing Cervantes back from the dead. Disinterring famous people has become a kind of sport in the Hispanic world. Before Cervantes, it happened to Evita, Che Guevara, Federico García Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. Perhaps reaching into the bottom of the pit is an effort to correct past mistakes, because the consensus is that these luminaries were all misunderstood by their contemporaries, at least the most powerful among them. The present ought to be nicer.
I have always considered it a beautiful metaphor that Cervantes had no fixed address in Spain. He is thus everywhere and nowhere. There are a number of sites connected with his life, but none attract hordes of travellers the way Stratford-upon-Avon and the Globe Theatre in London draw Shakespeare aficionados. But the circus surrounding the forensic work being done now might be the first sign of a nascent Cervantes tourism industry. The convent nuns where the forensic team has been working are already pondering the idea of opening their space to the public. A tomb has been proposed to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary, next year, of Cervantes’s death. The author Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who has set some of his novels in the Madrid neighborhood where the convent is located—a location in need of revitalization—envisions cafés, museums, and libraries there.
Clearly, Cervantes’s bones are good for business.
