Glosses on the vocabu(r)lario of the Celestina: II. El dolor de muelas de Calisto

Three decades ago Dorothy Severin (1978–79 [1989]) proposed that the Celestina's contemporary readers understood it as a funny book – 'a comic work with a tragic ending' (276) – but that readers today often miss this humour. She classified four levels of humour: the verbal, parodic, dramatic, and satirical, specifying the first as one of the most important facets of the work, making a distinction between what she deemed as surprisingly few verbal obscenities versus comic erotic scenes, citing in the first category the examples of Celestina's scabrous joke about Pármeno's cola de alacrán and Calisto's clumsy rejoinder to Melibea's complaint that his desonestas manos are tearing at her clothes: Señora, el que quiere comer el ave, quita primero las plumas (this last studied by Alan Deyermond [1985]).¹ M. E. Lacarra (1990: 45, 146; (ed.) 1995: xii–xiii) reaffirmed that it is in particular the first, the simples chistes groseros, which are today ignored by critics more interested in parody and irony. Like Severin, she distinguished the chistes fáciles from what she called el lenguaje de doble lectura (see also Lacarra (ed.) 1995; 2000). L. Fothergill-Payne (1993: 31, 36) also returned to the concept of La Celestina 'as a funny book', offering a Bakhtinian reading, buttressed by Freudian joke analysis. She classifies the work in Bakhtin's category of 'joyeuse littérature récréative des écoliers', or, in more contemporary terms, as the laughter of solidarity of the Monty Python 'wink, wink, say no more' variety.² In a seminal study on humour E. Michael Gerli (1995: 26) pointed out that although earlier studies saw laughter as something residing only in the reader, in fact, the laughter of the characters themselves serves as a paralinguistic gloss to signal the presence of a double-voiced or heteroglossic discourse of desire in the text.

At the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina (New York, 1999), I presented a first instalment of a 'vocabu(r)lario' of the Celestina, glossing two equivocal terms, la cola de alacrán and landrecillo, from the well-known seduction scene of Pármeno by Celestina in the Primer Auto (Vasvári 2005). A decade later, I offer these additional notes as glosses on the work's léxico equívoco. Linguistically, equivocal humour might be defined as a sort of verbal and psychological short circuit, which allows us – through the complicity between the text and those members of the audience with adequate linguistic competence – to economize by what linguists call relexicalization, uniting two ideas in a single word, thus creating linguistic ambiguity, as, for example, in the punchline of a dirty riddle.

Much verbal humour is obscene, a kind of agonistic game of verbal striptease, emphasizing a simultaneous hiding and uncovering, meant ultimately to reveal rather than to conceal. Such inherently teasing, seductive linguistic performance cannot occur in a linguistic vacuum but is a complex sociolinguistic and socio-cultural structure with attention to audience, setting and context. Gerli's study focusing on the laughter of the characters gives us guidance precisely in what a contemporary audience with linguistic competence found funny.

In the context of obscene humour it is useful to recall Keith Whinnom's (1967) Spanish Literary Historiography: Three Forms of Distortion, where he pointed out that it is an anachronism, first, to consider Spanish literature before the XVI century as a separate native tradition; second, to study the supposedly serious Golden Age tragedies instead of its far more numerous comedies; and, third (really a subdivision of the second), to disregard the obscenity and pornography rampant in many medieval and premodern texts, such as the Celestina and cancionero love poetry. He called these fallacies 'distortion of history by literary appreciation', (23), for which he blamed the prudishness of modern Spanish editors and critics as well as that of foreign hispanists.³ Ignacio Díez Fernández (2000: 32–34; cf. also Montero Cartelle 2000) adds that while every Spaniard knows from oral tradition that certain passages in Celestina are erotic, there is nevertheless a dearth of studies on the subject, for which he blames the tradition of Francoist repression and a too-strict religiosity. While I agree with his judgments, I would add that the scholarly ignorance of verbal humour is due not merely to prudery but also to the fact that most obscenities circulate in oral culture, and thus their textualization in works like the Libro de Buen Amor or La Celestina may slip by today unrecognized, particularly when in the intervening centuries they may have lost their connotative value.

Here, Whinnom's first distortion of literary historiography comes into play, the fallacy of studying medieval literatures along national lines, demonstrating that all three distortions are, in fact, inseparable. As I have shown in my work on the Libro de buen amor, much of the equivocal vocabulary of medieval texts can best be recuperated using the comparative tools of a folklore-oriented comparative philology, which seeks analogues in other languages and in visual cultures where it is not only not anachronistic but also imperative to consider examples later than the text being studied. I utilized this methodology, which I call linguistic archaeology, in my earlier vocabu(r)lario study, where I also included several visual examples.⁴ Here space limits the discussion to Calisto's feigned dolor de muelas in Act IV.

There exist several studies on dolor de muelas, usually in the context of the equally equivocal cordón, with which it is paired in the same episode.⁵ I follow the lead of these studies, but shall also provide folkloric and literary evidence on the continuation of this and related equivocal terms in Spanish and in other languages. My aim is to illustrate that Celestina's double entendres are so wide-spread geographically, chronologically, and across discourses, that it becomes impossible to consider them as textual juegos conceptistas, as claimed by Gariano. Though they can also be studied as literary wordplay, their roots are in pan European folk culture and, as Michele De Filippis (1998: 13) documented, their most pronounced characteristic is obscenity. Any speaker with native linguistic competence would recognize such verbal play, not least a 20-year old woman like Melibea – who, under the tutelage of her streetwise maid is given to singing dirty ditties at midnight (their lexicon is explicated by Montero Cartelle 2000: 124).

M. Dominica Legge (1950) was the first to discuss toothaches in medieval literature, citing a number of examples from French literature, where they are compared to the pangs of love, including erotic insomnia. Legge concluded in positivistic fashion that in a time when barbers extracted teeth with pincers and without anaesthesia such a comparison was realistic, and that therefore the Middle Ages would not have seen the incongruity that we do in the association of toothache and courtly love.

George Shipley (1975: 326–28) judged that Melibea was initially innocent, reacting as a 'correct maiden' should to Celestina's proposal but that then she was steered into complicity by the linguistic ruse of the toothache, allowing the two speakers to replace an indecorous and offensive line of communication by the fictitious but respectable substitute. Using dolor de muelas (and cordón) in this way is precisely the linguistic definition of euphemism: an alternative to a dispreferred term, used in order to avoid possible loss of face for the speaker and/or the listener (Allen and Burridge 2006: 26–27). However, as I shall try to show in the second part of this paper, the hilarity of the episode is that the supposed euphemistic dolor de muelas is actually far more obscene in folk tradition than what it replaces, so that it is really a dysphemism, as are terms like cola de alacrán. That is what makes them funny, as is often signalled by the laughter of the characters in the text. Here, however, both Celestina and Melibea pretend they are speaking euphemistically and it is the audience who laughs to hear that incongruous language in the mouth of a pseudo-innocent girl. They understand, as does Lacarra, that 'Melibea muestra conocer bien el léxico erótico, descodifica las palabras de Celestina y subraya la intención que encubren' (2000: 129).

Geoffrey West (1979), following on Shipley's work, also proposed that since the symptoms of Calisto's feigned toothache were synonymous with those of love-sickness, they were a linguistic subterfuge for Celestina in persuading Melibea to accede to Calisto's request for her girdle. West posed again the linguistically relevant questions: whether Rojas and his readers would have been aware of the double meaning of the toothache ruse; and, second, were readers meant to understand that Melibea was so naïve that she would have been deceived by Celestina's verbal subterfuge, or was she, too, in on the game? One of West's examples attests the equivocal use of 'toothache' from a 17th-century villancico, where two women plan a threesome with the barbero while their husbands are away: 'Pues llamemos al barbero / Que nos saque sendas muelas, / Y arrímalle las espuelas / Si no anduviere ligero'.

If we look at the full text (Alzieu 1983, no.92) we can see that other words also lend themselves to obscene understanding, such as espuela 'penis', as well as andar 'to be in the act of copulating'.⁶ At the beginning of the poem, one woman declares that she has sent her husband off to Cervera, a bit of folkloric geography that plays on that town's homonymic association with ciervo and hence suggests her husband's cuckolding. Continuing the wordplay, a companion adds that her husband will bring back a ciervo de montería, to which the first woman counters that hers has been instructed to bring her a madera (on the phallic associations of which see Vasvari 1997) to make calzadores, where the shoe trees to be fitted into shoes allude to the still current expression calzar a una mujer, suggesting that the impotent husband, unlike the barber, would need a prosthetic device to service her. Such a deeper folkloric reading of the text cited by West shows that he is too cautious in concluding that doubts remain concerning Melibea's awareness of the dolor de muelas subterfuge. As West himself illustrates, a girl like her could not have been ignorant of the suggestiveness of cordón, the other key equivocal term of the episode, because of the suggestiveness of the well-known popular refrain, Por mi mal me lo tomastes, caballero, el mi cordon. In such a case, she would also have been familiar with the equally widespread connotations of dolor de muelas.⁷

In a similar vein to West, Joaquín Casalduero (1977: 79) in a note suggested that Melibea should have been suspicious of Calisto's feigned dolor de muelas because she would have been expected to know still another proverb, which he cites in Italian: dolere a qualcuno qualche dente, meaning to feel intense desire, usually not reciprocated. Ángel Gómez Moreno and Teresa Jiménez Calvente (1995) are critical of West for accepting the interpretation, originally adduced by Legge, that the relationship between love and toothache is that both cause intense pain, citing another still-living popular proverb relating to toothaches: mal de muelas, mal de amores.

Also useful in the context of equivocal toothaches is an article by David Kunzle (1989: 29–30) on the art of pulling teeth in the 17th to the 19th centuries, which has not been cited in Celestina scholarship. He discusses how toothache has always been considered as a sign of moral corruption, earlier than for sexual guilt, and how even today medical science warns that decay results from excessive indulgence in sweets. It was still common, in a 17th-century German illustrated 'sociology' of trades and professions, to read under 'Dentist' the epigraph: 'sin will not come out without pain and suffering', and 'evil lust clings like a tooth in the vein-root and causes pain in the conscience. Out with it or the pain will grow; flesh must be crucified for the heart to rest in peace.' The popular preacher Abraham Sancta Clara, using the same engraving, said 'we unfortunate humans / we all have toothache and suffer ever and always from teeth with which Adam bit the forbidden apple'. Kunzle also discusses the inordinate role of teeth-pulling in art, greater than that of any other operation, with the theme reaching the status of a sub-genre in 17th-century Dutch art. However, neither he nor the website containing a number of illustrations (http://www.fisterra.com/human/3arte/pintura/temas/sacamuelas/sacamuelas/asp) deal with the potential erotic implications of, as the website states under one illustration, 'el paciente que abre desmesuradamente su boca y extiende su brazo en un gesto inequívoco de dolor insoportable'.

After this overview of studies on the humorous equivocal vocabu(r)lario of the Celestina in general and on the dolor de muelas specifically, in the second half of my study I will cite corroborative evidence for the widespread erotic relexicalization of the semantic field of 'tooth', 'toothache' and 'toothlessness' from texts earlier than the Celestina through 20th-century xerox-lore.

Note another different, although related, erotic use of diente/dentera, such as when Celestina, voyeuristically envious of Pármeno and Areusa's foreplay, says voyme, que me hazes dentera en besar y retocar, or when Lucrecia says the same thing in observing Calisto and Melibea (on female voyeurism, see Gerli 2003). In this context the association is between hunger and sexual excitement, akin to the burlesque beggar's lament (in Alzieu 1983: 96.11) about el pobre a diente / de carne cruda y caliente who asks for alms indiscriminately from doncellas, casadas, viudas and beatas caritativas, to give shelter to his niño alegre y juguetón who will sweep out every rincón.

In a Boccaccio story (Decameron VII.9), better-known as the pear tree story, a young wife dupes her husband into believing that a pear tree in their garden has such magical qualities that from its perch one only imagines what one sees. With this ruse she can openly have sex with her lover literally in front of her credulous husband. However, preliminary to the actual adultery she performs a bogus dental operation on him. Having convinced him that his mouth stinks because he has a rotten tooth, she painfully pulls out one of his good teeth, substituting for it a rotten one she had hidden in her hand. Tooth-pulling as a pantomime of sex is repeated in many later texts following Boccaccio as, for example, in the story where a prostitute gets her client to pull out a tooth to give her a memento. When he tries to get it back, he finds she has a whole bag filled with clients' teeth, and she tells him contemptuously: 'I don't know which one is yours, so you'll have to pick it out yourself' (Rotunda 1942: J2331.2).

The 16th-century French Sermon Joyeux de Saint Jambon et de Sainte Andouille 'Saint tripe sausage/penis' and 'Saint Ham/Buttocks' (Koopmans 1984: 211ff.), recounts in two parts the life, miracles, martyrdom, and canonization of two carnivalesque saints. The two come to a bad end, not unlike their alimentary relatives doña Cecina con el Tocino (LBA 1125d ), and are killed, one by being salted, the other hung, after which they are sold in the marketplace. Andouille undergoes further multiple martyrdom by being boiled, roasted on coals, cut up into pieces, and stuffed into the mouths of women, who later complained of 'toothache', and subsequently developed a more serious 'stomachache'.

Salas Barbadillo, in his burlesque La hija de Celestina (1612), gives Celestina three long monologues where she speaks literally ex cathedra. In the second, she explains what characteristics are best for lovers, explaining parodically her preference for old lovers over younger ones, defending her choice in the following terms (Cao 1992: 52):

Si están sin dientes me agrada,Porque en cualquier pendenciaMal pueden mostrar los dientesQuien tiene la boca yerma …Nada a la murmuraciónHombres semejantes pecan,Que mal hablará entre dientesQuien apenas tiene muelas.

The main verbal game here is between the metaphorical meanings of mostrar los dientes and hablar entre dientes, but sexual play enters also in that it is precisely 'toothless' old men who are powerless to do these things because impotent.⁸ We see the same joke in the old men who pine for sex in the German proverbs Der muss kein Nüsse knachen, der hohle Zähne hat 'he who has hollow teeth should not crack nuts' and Taube Nuss und hohler Zahn, / Junges Weib und alter Mann 'silent nut and hollow tooth, young wife and old man' (Aigremont 1978 [1908]: 91; on 'cracking nuts' as copulation see Vasvári 2008). This kind of toothlessness was still alive in a New York joke collected in 1937 of an elderly Jewish gentleman who says to his wife in bed on their golden wedding anniversary, 'Becky, hand me my teeth out of that glass – I want to bite you!' (Legman 1975: 527).

In contrast to 'toothless' old men, young men in German Carnival plays have names such as the adolescent Pilzan 'foal's (first) tooth' and the more mature Eberzahn 'wild boar tooth'. These examples illustrate that the dolor de muelas, above and beyond its associations with lovesickness, acquires inescapable obscene connotations because teeth, like bony and erect fingers, are a common corporal metonymy for the male organ.⁹ The obvious reason is the fascination with the 'bone on' qualities of the penis, even though it does not possess a bone. This is also why the penis bone of the very few animals (such as the stone marten) sporting these are considered good-luck charms and aphrodisiacs, as are the horns of various real and imaginary animals.¹⁰ Compare also young bones 'youth' in Shakespeare's King Lear, Eng. boner/bone on, and It. aver ossi in panza 'have an erection' (Cantagalli 1972). The phallic associations of teeth also explain the custom in many cultures, both primitive and in 21st-century urban ghettos, of ablating, filing, or ornamenting the teeth, and wearing decorative gold caps.

In a British jestbook (Hazlitt 1864: 48; Zall 1963: no.29) we have a dialogue between a gentleman and a lady about his toothache, not so different from the pseudo-euphemistic interchange between Celestina and Melibea, but here there is no doubt the lady is herself fully in command of this double discourse:

A gentleman and a gentlewoman sat together talking – which gentleman had great pain in one of his teeth, and happens to say to the gentlewoman thus: 'I wis ["know"], mistress, I have a tooth in my head which grieveth me very sore, wherefore I would it were in your tail'. She, hearing him saying so, answered thus: 'In good faith, sir, if your tooth were in my tail, it could do but little good – but if there be anything in my tail that can do your tooth good, I would it were in your tooth'. By this, ye may see that a woman's answer is seldom to seek.

In a Venetian song it is not the man but, as he explains, his beloved who invents the 'toothache' ruse to get him into bed (Corso 1914: 172):

La mia morose per farme despetola se despoggia e la se ne va in letto,e la fa finta che ghe dola un dentee pain bel belo la se mi tira arento.

('My beloved gets undressed, and to anger me, goes to bed and pretends to have a toothache, and then very nicely pulls me to her and pulls me inside (her)').

In a Galician folksong we again have women's toothaches, here, and paired with a cintura, serving the same function as Melibea's cordón (Ballesteros et al. 1886: I, 35.9):

As mulleres que son boasDios lles dé dolor de moasOrtigas pol-a cintura.

But, we may ask, why is the cintura made of the seemingly improbable ortigas? I can offer no written documentation but, from my own Hungarian culture, I recall when one of my female friends was very offended when a male guest at a party made jokes about young girls kneeling down to piss in the woods and being 'stung' by nettles. Manuel Costa Fontes (personal communication) informs me that in Portuguese, as well, ortigas still have a sexual suggestiveness.

In a Flemish story (Anonymous 1901: no.6) still another woman keeps on complaining of a toothache. Her husband suggests that she get it pulled out by the doctor but she claims that only the curé can perform the operation. The husband agrees but sends their son to spy on the couple from a treetop. An hour later the boy returns with the news that the cleric has pulled a very long tooth from the mother's trou, illustrating once again the in-out equivalence of carnivalesque dentistry. Another version of this story is in Samaniego's El jardín de Venus, here with the more conventional barbero, and with the added pornographic detail that the voyeuristic chico is visually recapitulating the sex act by looking through the agujero de la llave ('el Raigón', no.89):¹¹

Mientras ausente estaba / Un pobre labrador de su alquería, / Su mujer padecía / Dolor de muelas. / Esto lo causaba / Un raigón que, metido / En la encía, tenía carcomido. / En el lugar hacía de barbero /un mancebo maulero / a quien ella quería, / por lo cual mandó a un chico que tenía / le buscase y dijese / que a sacarla un raigón luego viniese. / El rapabarbas, como no era payo, / Vino con el recado como un rayo, / Y para hacer la cura / Se encerró con la moza. ¡Qué diablura!... / Digo esto porque nunca se sabría / Lo que el barbero con la moza hacía / A no ser por el chico marrullero, / Que curioso atisbó en el agujero / De la llave la diestra sacadura / Del raigón. Repitamos: ¡Qué diablura! / La operación quirúrgica acabóse / Y el barbero marchóse / Dejando a la paciente mejorada, / Mas del tirón bastante estropeada.

Finally, for a climactic example, let us look at a joke in the form of an extended riddle, collected in three versions (in Quito in 1965, with English versions in World War II and in Indiana in 1970), which describes what seems like the sex act but is actually a dentist taking out a molar from a girl's mouth (Dundes and Pagter 1987: 226–27). I quote the scene in its entirety because it illustrates well the suggestiveness, to readers of Celestina, of the dolor de muelas episodes – from the equivocation of lovesickness or toothache keeping the girl awake to her pseudo-innocent lamentation and initial resistance, her 'opening wide', and, when over, wanting more:

Con un suspiro se recostó ella, y los músculos de su bien formado cuerpo se aflo jaron. Por un instante, se resistió a él; pero, deseando de todo corazón que no hiciera caso de sus protestas (…) Eso que le había quitado el sueño tantas noches era lo que ella quería; pero, ahora había llegado el momento y tenía miedo. Cierto que él era un hombre con mucha experiencia, mas era la primera vez. Solos en esa piecita, ella se sintió nerviosa; él le ofreció no lastimarla. Le puso mano sobre aquel lugar que ella escondía mientras trataba de convencerla. Le quitó la mano, pero, él se la volvió a poner; y, esta vez, apretando. Ella dirigió los ojos, desmesuradamente abiertos, hacia la cosa que él tenía en la otra mano; sus protestas se acentuaron, mas todavía cuando él estuvo cerca sintiendo su aliento junto a su boca (…) la colmó de palabras dulces al oído. Le dijo: 'que era muy práctico y que no tuviera miedo, que no le iba a doler nada …'. Convencida, dejó que él maniobrara, aflojó los músculos y abrió bien para dar cabida a aquello (…) Su cuerpecito frágil se estremecía; quería luchar, pero sus fuerzas la abandonaban (…) Sintió correr algo caliente … SANGRE … SANGRE. Una emoción viva la envolvió, entonces gritó: 'No, por favor … ahora no aguanto más … No aguanto más. AH, AY, NO ME LA SAQUE, SE LO RUEGO …'

As Eukene Lacarra points out,what Celestina so crudely said about all women proved absolutely true for Melibea:

Coxquillosillas son todas; mas despues que una vez consienten la silla en el enves del lomo, nunca querrian holgar… muertas si; cansadas no. Si de noche caminan, nunca querrían que amaneciese.

(1989: 19)

We could also add here Celestina's later words to Sempronio about women who cautívanse del primer abrazo, ruegan a quien rogó. But then if Celestina's prognos-tications prove to be 'true' it is only because they articulate a collectively held fantasy on the nature of women. This is the way patriarchal culture insists on ever [re]telling the story and what it insists on finding funny in all this has not changed in five centuries. And if the fantasy is that all women want and need sexual intercourse, then folklore requires it to be even more so for young unmarried women who supposedly suffer from what the Elizabethans called the 'green sickness'. Virginity, as the saying goes, is curable (Frantz 1989: 57).

It could be argued from the foregoing examples that it is not only men but as often females who are having teeth extracted. It is relevant, as Freud suggested, that pulling teeth can represent a symbolic form of castration (cited in Dundes 1987: 180; see also Legman 1975: 519, 521 on neurotic fantasies of the barber or doctor as castrator), which certainly makes sense for the cuckolded husband in the Boccaccio story, and might also further highlight Calisto's passivity. However, there is also another image in play, that of a woman's open mouth in public, which is a sign of female transgression. What is being graphically played out here is that these women are presenting indiscriminately one or the other of their wide open and viscous oral cavities for penetration. The equivalence of the upper and lower buccal cavities, both large and rimmed by dark labia, one with teeth and the other without (if not for the vagina dentata), is also illustrated in an obscene riddle in Strapapola, whose official answer is 'the pot': 'Me vergogno di dir qual nome io m'abbia / E sono aspro al toccar, rozza al vedere; / Gran bocca ho senza denti, ho grosso labia, / Negra d'intorno …' (Toscan 1981: 111).

While in a tooth extraction in the real world a tooth is taken out, in the topsy turvy world of carnivalesque dentistry it is instead the male 'tooth' that is being shoved in. This is graphically illustrated in the cartoon below: