by Frank Wynne
Because of all these things which he said about all the various professions, people ran after him, without doing him any harm, but without giving him any peace; all the same, he couldn’t have defended himself against the boys if his guardian hadn’t protected him. Someone asked him what he should do in order not to be envious. He replied, ‘Sleep; for as long as you sleep you’ll be the equal of the person you envy.’
Someone else asked him how he would set about getting away with a commission for which he’d been trying for two years. And he said to him, ‘Ride off and watch out for the person who’s got it, and go with him until he goes out of the city, and that’s how you’ll get away with it.’
On one occasion a court judge happened to pass by the place where he was, on his way to a criminal case, with two constables and a crowd of people. Glass asked who he was, and when they told him, he said,
‘I’ll bet that judge has enough vipers in his bosom, pistols in his belt and lightning in his hands to destroy everything within his jurisdiction. I remember that I had a friend who was working on a criminal charge and who gave a sentence which was far in excess of the crime. I asked him why he had given such a cruel sentence and committed such a manifest injustice. He replied that he intended to grant the appeal, and by this means he was leaving the field open to the members of the Council to show their mercy by moderating and reducing to its proper proportions the harsh sentence he had passed. I replied that it would have been better to have given a sentence which would save them this trouble, for in this way they would consider him to be an upright and just judge.’
In the circle which, as I’ve said, always crowded round to listen to him was an acquaintance of his dressed as a lawyer, whom someone addressed as ‘Licenciate’; and as Glass knew that the man they called licenciate hadn’t even qualified for his first degree he said to him,
‘Take care, my friend, that the friars who devote themselves to ransoming prisoners don’t get hold of your degree, or they’ll take it off you as vagrant’s property.’
To which the friend replied, ‘Let’s behave properly to each other, Mr Glass, for you know that I’m a man of lofty and profound learning.’
Glass replied, ‘I know very well that you’re a Tantalus as far as learning is concerned, for it eludes you by reason of its loftiness and you can’t reach it because of its profundity.’
Once when he was near a tailor’s shop, he saw the tailor standing with his hands together, and said to him, ‘Doubtless, master, you are on the way to salvation.’
‘How do you arrive at that conclusion?’ asked the tailor.
‘How do I arrive at that conclusion?’ answered Glass. ‘I arrive at it by seeing that since you have nothing to do, you won’t have any reason to tell lies.’ And he added, ‘Woe to the tailor who does not lie and who sews on a holiday; it’s a marvellous thing that of all the members of that trade you’ll hardly find one who’ll make a suit fit, for there are so many sinners who make them.’
Of cobblers he said that never, in their way of thinking, did they make a bad shoe; because if the shoe was too narrow and tight for the person for whom they were making it, they told him that that was how it should be, for elegant people wore their shoes close-fitting, and that if they wore them for a couple of hours they’d be broader than sandals; and if they were too broad, they said that was how they should be, for the sake of the gout.
A bright boy, who was a clerk in a provincial office, and who pestered him a good deal with questions and requests, and brought him news of what was going on in the city (for he would discourse on and give an answer to everything), said to him on one occasion, ‘Glass, last night a money-changer who was condemned to be hanged died in prison.’
To which he replied, ‘He did well to hurry up and die before the executioner got his hands on him.’
On the pavement outside San Francisco church there was a group of Genoese, and as he walked by, one of them called him and said to him,
‘Come here, Mr Glass, and tell us a tale.’
He answered, ‘I’d rather not, lest you give me the bill for it in Genoa.’
On one occasion he bumped into a shopkeeper who was going along with a daughter of hers, who was very ugly, but covered in trinkets and finery and pearls, and he said to the mother, ‘You’ve done very well to cover her with stones, to make her fit for walking.’
About pastry-cooks he said that they had been playing a double game for many years without paying any penalty, because they had charged fourpence for cakes worth twopence; eightpence for those worth four and half a real for those worth eight, just as they took it into their heads.
Of puppeteers he said thousands of bad things: he said they were vagrants, who treated divine things without due respect, because they made a mockery of worship with the figures they put on in their shows, and sometimes they would stuff in a sack all or nearly all the figures in the Old and New Testaments and then sit on the sack to eat and drink in the eating-houses and taverns. In short, he said he was amazed that the powers that be didn’t put an end to their shows or banish them from the realm.
One day an actor happened to pass, dressed like a prince, and when he saw him, he said, ‘I remember seeing this fellow come out of the theatre with his face covered with flour and wearing a sheepskin inside out, and yet, off stage, he’s always swearing by his noble blood.’
‘He must be a nobleman,’ answered one of the spectators, ‘because there are many actors who are very well born and of noble blood.’
‘That may be true,’ replied Glass, ‘but the last people you need in a farce are people who are nobly born; they need to be good-looking, elegant and well spoken. I can say this for them too: they earn their bread by the sweat of their brow with intolerable hard work, always learning things by heart. They’re perpetual gipsies wandering from village to village and from inn to inn, losing sleep in order to give pleasure to others, because their own profit lies in the satisfaction they give to the public. They have this in their favour too: they deceive no one by their trade, for they are always showing their merchandise in public, for all to see and judge. The work of theatrical managers is incredible, and the worry they have remarkable, for they have to earn a great deal in order to avoid having so many debts at the end of the year that they have to go bankrupt. Yet they are necessary to the State, in the same way as woods, groves, restful landscapes, and all those things which provide honest recreation.’
He said that in the opinion of a friend of his anyone who paid court to an actress was the slave of a whole mass of ladies at the same time – a queen, a nymph, a goddess, a kitchenmaid, a shepherdess – and very often it also fell to his lot to serve a page and a lackey too; for all these roles and many more are normally played by actresses.
Someone asked him who had been the happiest person in the world. His answer was, ‘Nemo’; because ‘Nemo novit patrem; nemo sine crimine vivit; nemo sua sorte contentus; nemo ascendit in coelum.’
Of fencers he said on one occasion that they were masters of a science or art which was of no use to them when they needed it, and that they were somewhat presumptuous, since they wanted to reduce to mathematical demonstrations, which are infallible, the movements and the angry intentions of their opponents.
He was particularly hostile to those who dyed their beards; and once when he came upon two men quarrelling, the one who was Portuguese said to the Castilian, grasping his beard, which had been heavily dyed,
‘By this beard I name …’
Glass retorted,
‘Hey man, don’t say “I name”, but rather “I stain”.’
Another man had a beard that was a mixture of various colours, as a result of unskilful dyeing; and Glass told him that he had a beard like a speckled dungheap. To another man, whose beard was half black and half white because he hadn’t bothered about it, and the natural colour was growing out, he said that he should not wrangle or quarrel with anyone, because he ran the risk of being told that he was lying by half
his beard.
On one occasion he told how a bright and intelligent girl, in order to satisfy her parents’ wishes, consented to marry a white-haired old man, who the night before the wedding went, not to the river Jordan, as the old women say, but to the phial of silver nitrate, with which he touched his beard up to such effect that when he went to bed it was like snow and when he got up like pitch. When the time came to plight their troth, the girl looked at him with his beard all dyed, and she asked her parents to give her the same husband that they had shown her; for she wanted no other. They told her that the man she was looking at was the same as the one they had shown to her and given her as a husband. She replied that he was not, and brought as evidence that the man her parents had given her was a venerable white-haired man, and as this one had no white hair, it wasn’t the same one, and she was withdrawing on the ground that she had been tricked. She stuck to this, the man with the dyed beard was put to shame and the engagement was broken off.
Glass had the same antipathy towards duennas as he had towards those who dyed their hair; he talked endlessly of their permafoy, the shrouds of their headdresses, all their affected ways, their scruples, and their extraordinary meanness; he was annoyed by the way they complained about their stomachs and about their dizziness in the head, the way they had of speaking, which had more frills than their headdresses and their useless affectations.
Someone said to him, ‘Why is it, Licenciate, that I’ve heard you speak ill of many professions and you’ve never said a bad word about notaries, when there is so much to be said?’
He replied, ‘Although made of glass, I am not so fragile as to allow myself to be carried along by the crowd, which is usually wrong. It seems to me that notaries are what grammar is to backbiters and “la, la, la” to singers; because just as you cannot get at other branches of knowledge except by way of grammar, and just as the musician hums the tune over before he sings, so backbiters first show their tendency to slander by speaking ill of notaries and constables and other officers of the law, when the notary’s profession is one without which the truth would be suppressed, abused and brought into disgrace. And so Ecclesiasticus says: “In manu Dei potestas hominis est, et super faciem scribae imponet honorem.” The notary is a public figure, and the judge’s profession cannot be carried out properly without his. Notaries must be freemen, not slaves, nor sons of slaves; legitimate, and not bastards, or born of inferior race. They swear to keep secrets, to be true to their word and not to make statements for payment; that neither friendship, nor enmity, profit nor injury, will prevent them from performing their duty with a good Christian conscience. If this profession requires so many good qualities, why should one think that from the more than twenty thousand notaries in Spain the devil should reap the reward, as if they were shoots of his vine? I have no wish to believe it, nor is it right that anyone should believe it; because the long and the short of it is that they are the most necessary people in a well-ordered state, and if they have made off with too many dues, they have also done many things which were not their due, and between these two extremes one could find a happy mean which could make them take care what they’re about.’
On the subject of constables he said that it was not surprising that they should have some enemies, since their profession was either to make arrests, or to remove property from houses, or to keep people in their houses under custody and eat at their expense. He condemned the negligence and ignorance of attorneys and solicitors. As with doctors who get their fee, whether the patient gets better or not, so it is with attorneys and solicitors, whether or not the cause they are pleading is successful.
Someone asked him which was the best country. He replied that it was the one which gave prompt rewards.
The other replied, ‘That’s not what I’m asking, but which is the better place: Valladolid or Madrid?’
And he answered, ‘Madrid, for the highest and lowest; Valladolid for the parts in the middle.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the questioner.
And he replied, ‘In Madrid, the top and the bottom; in Valladolid the part between.’
Glass heard one man telling another that as soon as he got to Valladolid, his wife had fallen very ill, because the place didn’t agree with her. To this Glass said, ‘It would be better if it had finished her off, if she’s inclined to be jealous.’
About musicians and those who ran messages he said that they were limited in hopes and fortunes, because the messengers reached the end of theirs when they could go on horseback, and the others when they became musicians at the court.
Of ladies known as courtesans, he said that all or most of them were more courtly than they were sanitary.
One day when he was in a church he saw an old man being brought to be buried, a child to be baptized, and a woman to be married, all at the same time; and he made the comment that churches were battle fields, where the old meet their end, the young win the day and the women triumph.
On one occasion a wasp stung him on the neck, and he did not dare to shake it off, for fear of being broken: but all the same he complained. Someone asked him how he felt the wasp, if his body was made of glass. He answered that the wasp must be a backbiter, and that the tongues and mouths of backbiters were enough to penetrate bodies of bronze, let alone glass.
As a very fat monk happened to pass one of the bystanders said, ‘The father is so weak he can’t move.’
Glass said impatiently, ‘Let no one forget what the Holy Spirit says: “Nolite tangere christos meos”.’ And getting more impatient, he bade them consider that of the many saints canonized or included in the ranks of the blessed by the Church in recent years, no one had been called Captain So-and-So, or Secretary Such-and-Such, or the Count, Marquess or Duke of such-and-such a place, but Friar James, Friar Jacinto, Friar Raymond; in other words, they were all friars and monks, because the religious orders are heaven’s garden, whose fruits are placed on God’s table. He said that the tongues of backbiters were like the feathers of the eagle, which rub away and spoil those of all the other birds which come near them.
He said some extraordinary things about keepers of gaming-houses and about gamblers: that the former were a public menace, because once they had extracted the winnings from those who were in luck, they wanted them to lose and the cards to pass on, so that their opponents should win and they should collect their pile too. He had a lot to say about the patience of the gambler, who spent the whole night playing and losing, and although angry as a fiend, so that his opponent did not leave with his winnings, didn’t say a word and suffered like a martyr of the devil. He also had great things to say about the conscientiousness of some honourable gamblers who would not think of allowing their house to be used for any other games but pool and piquet: and by this means, slowly but surely, without fear of scandal, would find themselves at the end of the month with more winnings than those who played wilder games like reparolo and basset.
In short, he said so many things, that if it hadn’t been for such sure signs of his madness as his cries when anyone touched him, or came up to him, and for his dress, his frugality, his way of drinking, his unwillingness to sleep anywhere but out of doors in summer and in straw lofts in the winter, as we’ve said, no one would have believed that he wasn’t one of the sanest men in the world.
He suffered from this illness for some two years, and then a monk of the Jeromite order, who had a special gift for making deaf mutes hear and speak after a fashion, and for curing madness, out of charity took it upon himself to cure Glass. He managed to restore him to health, and to his previous good sense, intelligence and way of life. And as soon as he saw that he was sane, he dressed him up as a lawyer and sent him back to court, where, showing as many signs of sanity as he had previously shown indications of madness, he could practise his profession and make himself famous by it. This he did, and calling himself Licenciate Rueda, and not Rodaja, he went back to the court. As soon as he got there, he was recognized by the children; but
as they saw him dressed so differently from the way he usually went about they didn’t dare to hoot at him or ask him questions; but they followed him, and said to each other,
‘Isn’t this the madman Glass? Of course it is. He looks sane now. But he might still be just as mad when he’s wearing good clothes as when he wore bad ones. Let’s ask him something, and we’ll find out the truth of the matter.’
All this the licenciate heard, but he kept silent, and was more bewildered and confused than when he was out of his mind.
The children passed on the word to the men, and before the licenciate reached the courtyard of the Consejos he was being followed by more than two hundred people of all kinds. With this following, which was bigger than that of a professor, he reached the courtyard, where all the people there gathered round him. Seeing himself surrounded by such a crowd he spoke up as follows:
‘Gentlemen, I am Licenciate Glass; but not the man I used to be: now I am Licenciate Rueda. Events and misfortunes which happen in the world by heaven’s design put me out of my mind, and God’s mercies have now restored me to it. Bearing in mind the things they say I said when I was mad you can get an idea of what I shall say and do when I am sane. I am a Law graduate from Salamanca, where I was a poor student, and where I came out with a second; from this you can infer that I won my degree more by merit than as a result of influence. I have come here to this great sea of the capital to practise as a lawyer and to earn my living; but if you don’t leave me alone, I shall merely sweat away and die at the end of it. For heaven’s sake don’t follow me to the point of persecution, and make me lose when I am sane the living I made when I was mad. What you used to ask me in the squares, ask me now at home, and you will see that the man who gave you good answers extempore, as they say, will give you better answers when he’s thought them out.’
